Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks represent a critical impact-focused technique within the Service Disruption category, where adversaries deliberately attempt to render applications, services, or systems unavailable to legitimate users by overwhelming resources or exploiting vulnerabilities in targeted components. These attacks function as a destructive endgame in the attack lifecycle, often executed after successful initial access, privilege escalation, and lateral movement through the network. Attackers may employ various methods including volumetric attacks (flooding targets with excessive traffic), protocol attacks (exploiting weaknesses in network protocols), application layer attacks (targeting specific application vulnerabilities), or resource exhaustion attacks (consuming critical system resources like CPU, memory, or disk space). The impact can range from temporary performance degradation to complete system unavailability, potentially resulting in significant operational disruptions, financial losses, reputational damage, and violation of service level agreements. Modern sophisticated DoS attacks often leverage distributed attack vectors (DDoS), application-specific vulnerabilities, or employ techniques that amplify attack traffic, making them particularly challenging to mitigate without comprehensive defensive strategies that include traffic analysis, rate limiting, and architectural resilience measures.