Editing Denial-of-service attack (section)

===Application-layer attacks===
Application-layer attacks employ DoS-causing [[exploit (computer security)|exploits]] and can cause server-running software to fill the disk space or consume all available memory or [[CPU time]]. Attacks may use specific packet types or connection requests to saturate finite resources by, for example, occupying the maximum number of open connections or filling the victim's disk space with logs. An attacker with shell-level access to a victim's computer may slow it until it is unusable or crash it by using a [[fork bomb]]. Another kind of application-level DoS attack is XDoS (or XML DoS) which can be controlled by modern web [[application firewall]]s (WAFs). All attacks belonging to the category of ''timeout exploiting''.<ref>Cambiaso, Enrico; Papaleo, Gianluca; Chiola, Giovanni; Aiello, Maurizio (2015). "Designing and modeling the slow next DoS attack". ''Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems Conference (CISIS 2015)''. 249-259. Springer.</ref>

[[Slow DoS attack]]s implement an application-layer attack. Examples of threats are Slowloris, establishing pending connections with the victim, or [[Slowdroid|SlowDroid]], an attack running on mobile devices. Another target of DDoS attacks may be to produce added costs for the application operator, when the latter uses resources based on [[cloud computing]]. In this case, normally application-used resources are tied to a needed quality of service (QoS) level (e.g. responses should be less than 200&nbsp;ms) and this rule is usually linked to automated software (e.g. Amazon CloudWatch<ref>{{cite web|url=http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/|title=Amazon CloudWatch|work=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}</ref>) to raise more virtual resources from the provider to meet the defined QoS levels for the increased requests. The main incentive behind such attacks may be to drive the application owner to raise the elasticity levels to handle the increased application traffic, to cause financial losses, or force them to become less competitive. A ''banana attack'' is another particular type of DoS. It involves redirecting outgoing messages from the client back onto the client, preventing outside access, as well as flooding the client with the sent packets. A [[LAND]] attack is of this type.