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Avoiding Disruption of Service
to Maintain Availability
A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is one that is intended to compromise
the availability of a computing resource. Common DoS attacks include
ping floods and mail bombs—both intended to consume dispropor-
tionate amounts of resources, starving legitimate processes. Other
attacks are targeted at bugs in software and are intended to crash the
system. The infamous “ping of death” and “teardrop” attacks are
examples of these.
DoS attacks can be leveraged to subvert systems (thus compromising
more than availability) and disable them. When discussing the relevance
of DoS attacks to a security system, ...