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Denial-of-Service

From Tony Bradley, CISSP-ISSAP, for About.com

Definition: A denial of service (DoS) attack floods a network with an overwhelming amount of traffic, slowing its response time for legitimate traffic or grinding it to a halt completely. The more common attacks use built-in “features” of the TCP/IP protocol to create exponential amounts of network traffic.
Also Known As: DoS, DDoS
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