When a server or system is attacked in such a way that it is flooded with traffic and unable to respond to legitimate requests is referred to as a _______________ attack.

• A. Buffer Overflow
• B. Brute Force
• C. Distributed Denial of Service
• D. Denial of Service

Answer: (D)

A denial of service attack is when a server or service is overwhelmed to the point that it can’t respond to legitimate requests. The description of being flooded with traffic and unable to respond matches this concept directly: the attacker’s aim is to exhaust resources or bandwidth so normal users can’t access the service. If the flood comes from many different sources, it’s still a denial of service at heart, just the distributed variant, but the core idea remains making the service unavailable.

Buffer overflow describes a vulnerability where more data is written to a buffer than it can hold, potentially causing crashes or code execution. Brute force is trying many credentials to guess an access key. A Distributed Denial of Service is specifically the version where multiple systems coordinate to overwhelm the target; while related, the question’s scenario doesn’t require multiple sources to be implied. The situation described best fits a denial of service attack.