Denial of Service
A denial of service (DoS) is an attack in which an intruder severely limits or
crashes your system by sending an abundance of packets containing oversized data segments, incorrect header information, or overloaded service requests.
Some reasons attackers use DoS attacks include the following:
- A reboot is required to activate a newly installed Trojan horse.
- An attacker wants to cover their tracks, or conceal CPU activity with a random
crash.
Reasons that an administrator might use a DoS attack:
- To ensure that their computers are not vulnerable by testing the latest patch.
- To stop a computer that cannot be physically accessed, such as a computer
running a runaway process and causing problems.