What kind of attack involves overwhelming a network service to make it unavailable?

A denial of service attack is characterized by overwhelming a network service, rendering it unavailable to intended users. This type of attack typically floods the target with excessive requests, exhausting its resources and leading to legitimate requests being unfulfilled. The goal is to disrupt the normal functioning of the service, often causing downtime or degraded performance.

In contrast, a man-in-the-middle attack focuses on intercepting communication between two parties, with the intent to eavesdrop or alter the data being transmitted without either party's knowledge. A phishing attack is aimed at deceiving users into revealing personal information, such as passwords or credit card numbers, typically through fraudulent emails or websites. An SQL injection attack exploits vulnerabilities in applications by inserting malicious SQL code into queries, potentially leading to unauthorized access to database contents. Each of these attacks serves different malicious purposes and targets different vulnerabilities within a network or application.