denial-of-service attack

1. Often spread by e-mail viruses, these are deliberately planned attacks on a companies or organizations, Web sites, or servers. They aim to shut down access to a site or key server by flooding it with massive requests, placing such great demands on the targeted information infrastructure that no one else can gain access to it. (See cyberwarfare.)

Example Sentences

Earlier in October, Russian hackers were purportedly behind a denial-of-service attack against Raffensberger's government website, which provides instructions for people on how to vote in Georgia.

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Also, a Ukrainian online bank said it fought off a massive distributed denial-of-service attack on Tuesday.

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The Associated Press news website experienced an outage that appeared to be consistent with a denial-of-service attack, a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline.

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"The analysis shows that it is a denial-of-service attack," a parliament spokesperson said.

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Meanwhile, Finland’s parliament said that its website was hit with a so-called denial-of-service attack, which made the site hard to use, with many pages not loading and some functions not available, the Associated Press reported from Helsinki.

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