Denial-of-service (or DoS) is the intentional attack of a machine or resource, aiming to make unavailable to its intended users, often by overloading it with artificially crafted requests.
Denial-of-service (or DoS) is the intentional attack of a machine or resource, aiming to make unavailable to its intended users.
Most common are network based attacks that send to the target machine a huge number of artificially crafted requests. These may be just an ordinary requests or they may be intentionally tweaked or broken to create more load than usual. Trivial attacks are easy to prevent by blocking the originating IP address but more advanced attacks may use distributed IP addresses from the whole world.
DoS attacks violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers (as well as official laws of certain nations).
There are various software and hardware solutions that help to protect services from such attacks.
