What type of attack involves overwhelming a server with excessive traffic to make it unavailable to legitimate users?

Question

Accepted Answer

Denial of Service (DoS). A Denial of Service (DoS) attack overwhelms a server, network, or service with an excessive volume of traffic or requests, consuming its resources until it can no longer respond to legitimate users. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks amplify this by using multiple compromised computers (botnets) to generate traffic simultaneously from many sources.

Phishing is a social engineering attack that uses deceptive emails, websites, or messages to trick users into revealing sensitive information like passwords or credit card numbers - it targets human behavior rather than server resources. A Man-in-the-Middle attack intercepts communication between two parties, secretly reading or altering the data in transit without either party's knowledge. SQL Injection exploits vulnerabilities in web applications by inserting malicious SQL code into input fields, potentially gaining unauthorized access to database contents.

Security threats and countermeasures are heavily tested on the CLEP exam. Students should be able to identify different types of attacks, understand how each one works, and know appropriate defensive measures. Recognizing the distinction between attacks that target availability (DoS), confidentiality (eavesdropping), and integrity (data modification) is key to answering these questions correctly.

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