A smaller online retailer is experiencing huge numbers of requests on their websites. They are not running any major marketing campaigns and while seeing a lot of traffic are not seeing a rise in sales or logins. Eventually their web servers become overloaded and users are unable to load pages on the website. What type of attack most likely occurred?
Answer Description
Most likely this was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack using bots to create large amounts of malicious web requests. With enough requests the web server's capacity will be exhausted and no one will be able to access the website.
Wikipedia
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.In a distributed denial-of-service …
Denial-of-service attack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia