A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is specifically designed to overwhelm a website with traffic, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests. In this type of attack, multiple compromised systems, often part of a botnet, send a flood of traffic to the target website. The sheer volume of requests exceeds the website's capacity, causing it to slow down significantly or even become completely unavailable to users.
This method of disruption takes advantage of the underlying infrastructure of the web, exploiting the limited bandwidth or resources of the server hosting the website. The aim is to make the service inaccessible, which can result in significant financial loss and damage to the organization's reputation. In contrast, the other options focus on different types of vulnerabilities or malicious activities that do not directly relate to overwhelming a website with traffic.