What is a dos attack (Denial of Service)?

Question

What does that mean and can it be fixed when it gets done?

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

Answer 2

Whenever you want to load a webpage, your web browser sends a request to the website server, which hosts the webpage. The website server in turns uploads the webpage to your browser. In a DoS attack, a large group of computers send requests to the same website server. This flood of requests overwhelms the website server. It can not accommodate the traffic and it quickly becomes bogged down. No one can access the webpage because of the traffic. Hackers can do this to a online e-mail service (e.g. Yahoo! mail) and no one can get their mail or they can do this to a online business (e.g. Walmart) and effective shut down the online purchase site. Hackers can extort money from businesses by threatening to disable the company's website so customers can't use their services (e.g. banks).