Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications. For example, specific features in web applications may be highly resource intensive. Repeated requests to those features may be able to exhaust system resources and deny access to the application or the server itself.(Citation: Arbor AnnualDoSreport Jan 2018)
Repeated invocation of high-resource application endpoints or GUI components causing CPU and memory spikes, logged as elevated request volumes, prolonged handle locks, or frequent crash recoveries.
Automated scripts or repeated CLI/API requests that trigger application backends to consume high CPU or memory (e.g., Apache/PHP, MySQL, mail servers), resulting in syslog errors and excessive process spawning.
Automated abuse of cloud-hosted applications (e.g., web apps, REST endpoints, internal APIs) causing compute exhaustion, high 5xx error rates, or frequent autoscaling triggers logged in app insights or cloudwatch.