Attacks on availability provide adversaries a way to complete stop traffic to specific sites, applications or systems. A young hacker in 2000 initiated the first DDOS attack in the United States, showing companies the importance for cyber security.

How Do These Attacks Occur?
An availability attack is an attack that works to deny authorized users access to specific systems or services. Ransomware and Denial of Service are just two examples of the types of attacks that can be considered an availability attack because both can disrupt a system’s availability.
In 2000, a 15-year-old Canadian boy that went by the hacker name of “Mafiaboy”, orchestrated a series of Denial of Service attacks against big retail sites such as Yahoo, Amazon, CNN and eBay (Dennis, 2025). Mafiaboy was able to make this attack possible by hacking into computer systems that were all connected to the internet and remote controlled these computers with the rootkit he acquired. The computers then sent thousands of data packets to the websites which inevitably stopped the sites availability (Kasam, 2024).

Organizational Impact
In the span of a couple hours Mafiaboy’s attack took down major commercial websites and caused an estimated 1 billion USD in damages (Kasam, 2024). Not only did the attack cause significant financial damage, but it also damaged the company’s reputation. This DDOS attack was the first of its kind and was an eye opener to the public about the lack of security when it came to technology, because if a 15-year-old could figure out how to do this what is stopping other countries? By shutting these sites down, it causes users to reconsider whether buying goods on these sites is worth the risk, if the company’s security is not good enough to protect their information.

Possible Defenses
There are plenty of defenses or countermeasures companies can take to prevent attacks on availability. The biggest one is ensuring there is some form of system/data monitoring so that way you can identify any suspicious activity as fast as possible. A company could also implement rate limiting which is defined as “the practice of limiting the amount of traffic available to a specific Network Interface Controller (NIC) and can be done at the hardware or software level” (Okta, n.d.). Rate limiting would be a very effective defense option because DDOS attacks work by trying to over load the systems with a very large amount of traffic to cause it to shut down from being overwhelmed.

Conclusion
Attacks on availability are a wide known and devastating threat to all systems that cyber security professionals should be constantly trying to prevent. The example shared while was
harmful to users and companies; if an attack on vulnerability targeted more critical systems such as communications or government defense the outcome could leave people vulnerable to physical attacks from outside sources. It is important to be vigilant and proactive against these types of attacks in all different areas.

References
Dennis, M. (2025, April 21). Denial of Service Attack. Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/denial-of-service-attack

How to mitigate DOS attacks – DOS mitigation strategies: Okta Developer. How to Mitigate DoS Attacks – DOS Mitigation Strategies | Okta Developer. (n.d.). https://developer.okta.com/books/api-security/dos/how/

Kasam, A. (2024). What enterprises can learn from Project Revolta by Mafiaboy. ITSecurityWire. https://itsecuritywire.com/featured/what-enterprises-can-learn-from-project-revolta-by-mafiaboy