What type of attack aims to exhaust the resources of a network or system?

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is designed specifically to overwhelm a network or system, making it unavailable to legitimate users. This type of attack floods the targeted system with an excessive amount of traffic or requests, consuming its resources such as bandwidth, memory, or processing power, ultimately causing disruption or a complete shutdown of services.

This attack exploits vulnerabilities in a system’s capacity to handle requests, leading to a denial of service for users attempting to access the system or network. By consuming resources, a DoS attack prevents the organization from conducting normal operations and can result in loss of revenue and trust.

The other types of attacks listed, while they can pose significant security threats, do not primarily focus on resource exhaustion. A Man-in-the-Middle attack involves intercepting and potentially altering communication between two parties. A Brute-force attack focuses on systematically guessing passwords or encryption keys. An Injection attack manipulates a web application by injecting malicious code. These methods do not have the primary goal of resource exhaustion like a DoS attack does.