Question

A hacker overloads the KOI website and shutdowns the service so that legitimate users such as student and staff can no longer access it. Mention the name and describe the type of attack carried out on the KOI website with an explanation

Answer 1

Overloading a website and shutting down the service so that the legitimate users cannot access the service is called a Denial of Service (DOS) attack.

In a Denial of Service attack, an attacker targets a website and sends numerous requests to the server that exceeds the maximum number of requests a server can handle. As the server cannot handle these many requests, the server will not respond or will get shut down thus stays unavailable for the legitimate users.

In the above image one can notice that, the maximum number of requests that the server can handle ie 99999,but the attacker sends millions of requests at a time. As the server cannot handle those many requests at a time, it crashes thus preventing the users from accessing the server.