All host based attacks, including Denial of Service (DOS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) in a slightly different sense, irrelevant of the category (Section 3.2.2) they belong to, are aimed at gaining attacker privileges under which the attacked program is running. The applications attacked are usually the ones labeled as ``trusted'' by the system administrator. A ``trusted'' program is a program that is running with privileges that enable it to perform sensitive system operations. In most cases, ``trusted'' programs run under superuser privileges. Once such a program is subverted attacker gains all of the privileges of the program, which usually turns disastrous for the system.