Cisco Cyber Security Practice Exam 2025 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

The attack that involves a cybercriminal sending maliciously formatted packets to crash a database server is categorized as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In a DoS attack, the attacker focuses on overwhelming a server with a flood of traffic or specially crafted packets, causing it to become unavailable to legitimate users. This can manifest through various methods, including sending malformed requests or packets that exploit vulnerabilities within the server software. By using these tactics, the attacker disrupts the normal operation of the database server, effectively denying service to its intended users.

While other options like DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) also involve overwhelming a service, the key distinction lies in the scale and methodology of the attack. In DDoS attacks, the traffic comes from multiple compromised systems, making it harder to defend against. Phishing, on the other hand, involves tricking individuals into revealing sensitive information, and backdoors refer to methods that allow unauthorized access to systems, which are unrelated to the direct crashing of a server through malicious packets. Thus, focusing on the nature of disrupting service through malicious packets aligns with the definition of a DoS attack.