In a DoS attack, what is usually the goal of the malicious actor?

In a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, the primary goal of the malicious actor is to disrupt the availability of a network service. This type of attack targets the resources of a network or server to render it unavailable to its intended users. By overwhelming the target with excessive traffic or exploiting vulnerabilities, the attacker causes legitimate requests to either be delayed or completely ignored, resulting in downtime or degraded performance for users.

The aim is not to steal information or improve performance, nor is it about creating user accounts. Instead, the focus is solely on causing disruption to service availability, making option C the correct choice in this context.