Denial Of Service Attacks

A denial of service attack is when a malicious hacker prevents an authorized user from gaining access to a computer resource. Denial of service attacks are often carried out against large companies, such as banks or other financial websites. When one of these websites becomes a victim of a denial of service attack, customers are potentially unable to access the site and check the state of their finances or make purchases. This leads to a significant loss in revenue, especially for large sites such as ebay.

A denial of service attack can be carried out in many ways. One method is to flood the victim's machine with external communication requests so that it will be unable to respond to legitimate traffic. Attacks such as this can cause the internet speeds of an entire geographic region to be greatly reduced.