Ethical Hacking Essentials Practice Test

Which attack is primarily focused on overwhelming a system's resources to render them unavailable to legitimate users?

1. Denial-of-Service Attack

2. UDP Flood Attack

3. SYN Flood Attack

4. Distributed Reflection DoS Attack

The correct answer is: Denial-of-Service Attack

The correct choice is focused on overwhelming a system's resources, which is the hallmark of a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. This type of attack seeks to make a service unavailable to its intended users by flooding the server with excessive requests or exploiting vulnerabilities within the server's software or network configuration. The primary goal is to interrupt normal service by saturating bandwidth or consuming system resources, leading to legitimate users being unable to access the service. Other attack types mentioned, while related, represent specific methods that can be employed to execute a denial-of-service attack. For example, UDP Flood and SYN Flood attacks are specific techniques used to achieve the same end goal but are not the broad category encapsulated by Denial-of-Service. A Distributed Reflection DoS attack involves multiple compromised systems targeting a single system, which is another method of executing a denial-of-service strategy, but it is not as general as simply defining the whole concept of rendering resources unavailable. Therefore, the general definition of a Denial-of-Service attack captures the essence of overwhelming resources to prevent legitimate access.