A denial of service (DoS) attack aims to make a website unavailable by consuming its bandwidth or resources. There are various types of DoS attacks, including bandwidth consumption attacks that flood a server with traffic, resource starvation attacks that exhaust a server's storage or memory, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that use multiple compromised computers or "zombies" to launch attacks. DoS attacks can cause costs from lost revenue, determining the nature and response to the attack, and implementing safeguards. While some attacks have malicious motives like blackmail or sabotage, even unintentional mass emails can overwhelm systems and crash services.