In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or
distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt
to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its
intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for,
and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of
efforts to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend
services of a host connected to the Internet. Perpetrators of
DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-
profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways,
and even root nameservers. This technique has now seen extensive
use in certain games, used by server owners, or disgruntled
competitors on games such as Minecraft. The term is generally
used relating to computer networks, but is not limited to this
field; for example, it is also used in reference to CPU resource
management. One common method of attack involves saturating the
target machine with external communications requests, so much so
that it cannot respond to l