What is a potential outcome of a successful DDoS attack?

A successful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack aims to overwhelm a network or service with a flood of traffic, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate users. This excessive amount of traffic can saturate the bandwidth of the targeted service, cause servers to crash, or exhaust resources, leading to an overall service unavailability. As a result, legitimate users are unable to access the service or application, which is the primary objective of such attacks.

Other outcomes associated with network attacks tend to focus on improving security or performance, but in the context of a DDoS attack, the primary result is detrimental to service availability rather than beneficial changes to security protocols or the enhancement of service functionalities. Thus, the identification of service unavailability due to traffic overload accurately captures the core impact of a successful DDoS attack.