Software Engineering Institute

A "denial-of-service" attack is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. Examples include attempts to "flood" a network, thereby preventing legitimate network traffic, attempts to disrupt connections between two machines, thereby preventing access to a service, attempts to prevent a particular individual from accessing a service, and attempts to disrupt service to a specific system or person.

Not all service outages, even those that result from malicious activity, are necessarily denial-of-service attacks. Other types of attack may include a denial of service as a component, but the denial of service may be part of a larger attack.

Illegitimate use of resources may also result in denial of service. For example, an intruder may use your anonymous ftp area as a place to store illegal copies of commercial software, consuming disk space and generating network traffic.