Resource Starvation

Resource starvation is a subtechnique within the Service Disruption technique under the Impact tactic, where attackers deliberately consume system resources to degrade application performance or cause complete denial of service. This is achieved by exploiting the finite nature of computational resources such as CPU, memory, disk space, network bandwidth, connection pools, or thread capacity. Attackers may implement resource-intensive operations through specially crafted requests that trigger excessive resource allocation, recursive operations that don't terminate properly, or by flooding systems with numerous concurrent requests. Unlike traditional volumetric DDoS attacks, resource starvation can be executed with relatively small payloads that target specific application vulnerabilities, making these attacks harder to detect and mitigate. The impact ranges from degraded performance and increased latency to complete application unavailability, potentially affecting revenue, reputation, and compliance posture of the targeted organization.