Denial of Service

The threat of denial of service involves actions that prevent a network element from functioning in accordance with its intended purpose. Network Elements may be rendered partially or entirely unusable for legitimate users. Denial of service may cause operations which depend on timeliness to be delayed. Examples of denial of service include:

• Unauthorized modification of existing network element resources (e.g. hardware, software, and databases) which affects the availability of the resource; and
• The degradation of network element service caused by a large volume of service requests.