What are "Denial of Service" (DoS) attacks?

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are fundamentally designed to make a service unavailable to intended users by overwhelming it with excessive requests or exploiting its vulnerabilities. When a system or service is subjected to such an attack, it can become slow, unresponsive, or entirely offline, preventing legitimate users from accessing the resources or services they need.

The nature of DoS attacks typically involves flooding the targeted service with a barrage of traffic, thus exhausting its resources such as bandwidth, memory, or CPU. As the service struggles to cope with the overload, legitimate requests are either delayed or dropped, resulting in a denial of access for users.

This answer stands out because it accurately captures the essence of DoS attacks—essentially a disruption of normal service due to intentional and excessive strain on the system. Other options presented do not relate to the characteristics or goals of DoS attacks, which revolve around service unavailability rather than unauthorized file deletions, user privacy enhancement, or network speed improvements.