What is a denial-of-service attack?

It is also known as DoS. It is an attack which shuts down a machine, device or network and makes it inaccessible to its users. . It is down by flooding the target with traffic which degrades it's performance.

A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is where an attacker overwhelms a network or service with excessive traffic, resulting in it being made unavailable for users. This is achieved by flooding the target with more requests than it can handle, causing it to slow down or crash.

For example, an attacker could target Netflix by sending a DoS attack to the server which is responsible for providing movies to users. They could send large amounts of traffic to the website, resulting in Netflix users being unable to watch movies due to the streaming service being slow or not working entirely because of the DoS attack.