EC-Council Certified SOC Analyst (CSA) Practice Exam 2025 – Comprehensive Prep

The type of attack characterized by overwhelming a system's resources to render it unavailable to its intended users is known as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this scenario, the attacker aims to disrupt the normal functioning of a targeted server, service, or network by bombarding it with an excessive amount of requests or traffic. This flood of incoming messages can consume the target's bandwidth or server capacity, ultimately causing legitimate requests to be denied due to the exhaustion of resources.

Denial of Service attacks can take various forms, including simple DoS attacks from a single source or more complex Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that originate from multiple compromised systems. The primary goal remains the same: to disrupt the availability of services for legitimate users.

While network scan attacks focus on discovering vulnerable systems, malware attacks involve malicious software designed to harm or exploit systems, and data breach attacks seek to exfiltrate sensitive information, none of these directly involve overwhelming resources to cause unavailability, which is the defining characteristic of Denial of Service attacks.