an attack in which no access to the system(s) is gained, but rather a loss of service is incurred, typically the loss of network connectivity and services

an attack in which one user takes up so much of a shared resource that none of the resources is left for other users

a relentless stream of information sent to a target with the intention of flooding it until it can no longer handle legitimate traffic

Repeated attack of a particular network or server until it is too overwhelmed and is brought down.

An assault on a network that interferes with regular traffic by overwhelming the Internet server. The server is flooded with so many superfluous connection requests that it ignores legitimate ones.

Flooding communication systems, Internet hosts, computers, routers, Web servers, etc. with so much mail, requests, or other sorts of traffic that these crash under the load. See Distributed denial-of-service attack. _____________________________________________________________________________

An organized effort to disrupt email or Web service by sending more messages or traffic than a server can handle, shutting it down until the messages stop.

An attack in which a mail server, web server or even telephone system is purposely overloaded with phony requests so that it cannot respond properly to valid ones.

An email denial-of-service attack is an organized effort to disrupt the flow of communication by swamping an email or Web server with more messages or traffic than it can handle and effectively shutting down the server until the message flow stops. In email, this usually occurs when virus-infected email messages generate millions of outgoing messages. Although denial-of-service attacks are not new, they have become a new tactic in the war between spammers and anti-spammers. Spammers first launched denial-of-service attacks against blacklisting Web sites run by anti-spammers. Now, anti-spammers are considering using the same weapon against the spammers.

An attack on a computer system intended to reduce, or entirely block, the level of service that 'legitimate clients' can receive from that system. These range in scope from network bandwidth wasting and/or swamping through exhausting various machine resources (memory, disk space, thread or process handles, etc) required by the process(es) providing the service. They usually work by exploiting vulnerabilities that eventually crash the service process or the underlying system. Although not commonly associated with viruses, denial-of-service components are included in some viral payload routines.

Denial of service is an attack designed to block user access to a Web site or network by flooding it with bogus information (such as a surplus of requests). The information overload maxes out the Web site or network's processing capabilities, resulting in the user's inability to access Internet services and making it appear inaccessible. These DoS attacks damage productivity and can be highly frustrating, though the hacker's primary purpose of such attacks is generally disruption and not identity theft.

A network attack created by flooding a host with data. When a server's resources are occupied by such and attack, legitimate requests may be denied. If the rate and volume of data reach a certain level, the server program may crash.

An attack in which an attacker exploits a weakness or a design limitation of a network service to overload or halt the service, so that the service is not available for use. This type of attack is typically launched to prevent other users from using a network service such as a Web server or a file server.

In computer security, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Typically the targets are high-profile web servers, and the attack attempts to make the hosted web pages unavailable on the Internet. It is a computer crime that violates the Internet proper use policy as indicated by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).