<P> In March 2014, after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing, DigitalGlobe launched a crowdsourcing service on which users could help search for the missing jet in satellite images . The response overwhelmed the company's servers . </P> <P> An unintentional denial - of - service may also result from a prescheduled event created by the website itself, as was the case of the Census in Australia in 2016. This could be caused when a server provides some service at a specific time . This might be a university website setting the grades to be available where it will result in many more login requests at that time than any other . </P> <P> In computer network security, backscatter is a side - effect of a spoofed denial - of - service attack . In this kind of attack, the attacker spoofs (or forges) the source address in IP packets sent to the victim . In general, the victim machine cannot distinguish between the spoofed packets and legitimate packets, so the victim responds to the spoofed packets as it normally would . These response packets are known as backscatter . </P> <P> If the attacker is spoofing source addresses randomly, the backscatter response packets from the victim will be sent back to random destinations . This effect can be used by network telescopes as indirect evidence of such attacks . </P>

How is denial of service attack a threat to network security