Attacks, Breaches, and Regulation

A denial-of-service, or DoS, attack aims to make a system or network unavailable to legitimate users by overwhelming it with traffic or requests, directly undermining the "availability" pillar of the CIA triad. A distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack achieves the same goal using many sources simultaneously, typically a network of compromised devices, making it far harder to block than traffic from a single origin. In October 2016, a massive DDoS attack against Dyn, a company providing core domain name system infrastructure, disrupted access to major sites including Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit across large parts of the United States.