What type of attack floods a server with traffic to overwhelm it and cause service disruption?

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is characterized by overwhelming a server with excessive traffic, which leads to service disruption and renders the server unable to fulfill legitimate requests. The goal of this type of attack is to exhaust the resources of the targeted system, often resulting in downtime and loss of availability for users.

In the context of this question, the other options do not fit the criteria for flooding a server with traffic. A phishing attack aims to deceive individuals into providing sensitive information but does not involve overwhelming network resources. A man-in-the-middle attack focuses on intercepting and possibly altering communications between two parties but does not specifically target server performance. An SQL injection attack is a method of exploiting vulnerabilities in an application’s database query process, manipulating the database rather than overwhelming it with traffic. Thus, the denial-of-service attack is the only option that directly matches the description of flooding a server with traffic to cause disruption.