Which type of attack involves overwhelming a service with traffic to disrupt its functionality?

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is characterized by overwhelming a service with excessive traffic, thereby disrupting its normal functionality and making it inaccessible to legitimate users. This type of attack aims to exhaust the resources of the targeted system or network, often rendering websites or services slow or entirely inoperative. Attackers typically utilize bots or other methods to produce a flood of requests, leading to resource depletion.

In contrast, phishing involves deceitful techniques to gather sensitive information by pretending to be a trustworthy source. A man-in-the-middle attack refers to intercepting and altering communications between two parties without their knowledge, while a brute force attack focuses on systematically guessing passwords to gain unauthorized access to systems. Each of these other techniques serves different malicious purposes and does not involve overwhelming a service with traffic in the same way that a DoS attack does.