The type of attack that floods a service to render it unavailable is called?

• A. Phishing
• B. Phreaking
• C. Denial of Service
• D. Spoofing

Answer: (C)

Disrupting a service by overwhelming its resources so legitimate users can’t access it is a Denial of Service. In a DoS attack, the attacker floods the target with more traffic or requests than it can handle, exhausting bandwidth, CPU, memory, or other critical resources and making the service unavailable to real users. If many machines are used to generate the flood, it’s called a Distributed Denial of Service, but the core idea remains the same: deny service by overwhelming the system.

Phishing involves deceiving people to reveal sensitive information, not crashing a service. Phreaking is historical hacking of telephone networks. Spoofing means impersonating another source, which can assist various attacks but doesn’t by itself describe flooding a service to make it unavailable.