There are a large number of different forms of attacks which aim to prevent certain services, functions or devices from being used as intended. The generic term used for these attacks is "denial of service". In many cases, these attacks are often referred to as a "DoS attack".

Amongst others, these attacks can be initiated by disgruntled employees or customers, but also by competitors, blackmailers or politically motivated perpetrators. The target of the attacks may be all kinds of business-relevant values. Typical forms of DoS attacks include:

• disrupting business processes, e.g. by flooding the incoming order department with incorrect orders.
• impairing the infrastructure, e.g. by blocking the doors of the organisation.
• causing IT failures, e.g. by specifically overloading the services of a server in the network.

This type of attack is often connected to the use of distributed resources, with the attacker placing such high demands on these resources that they are no longer available to the actual users. When IT-based attacks are conducted, for example, a shortage of the following resources can be artificially induced: processes, CPU time, memory, disk space, transfer capacity.

Example:

• In spring 2007, strong DoS attacks to numerous Internet websites were carried out in Estonia over a longer period of time. This resulted in significant impairments when using information sites and services in the Internet in Estonia.

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