Suppose Alice isn\'t able to break into Bob\'s email account, but Alice can stil

Question

Suppose Alice isn't able to break into Bob's email account, but Alice can still do damage to Bob (a VIP) if she can stop him from being able to use his own email (or any other online) account to send and receive important emails.

So what she does is she writes a computer script that guesses a random password (since most email addresses have the same username) so that it locks her out. Could this also lock Bob out?

What if instead of one or two computers, she goes on the black market and uses thousands of bot computers around the nation to target Bob's account? Or she manages to hack Bob's wifi network so she even has the same IP address? What's there to stop Alice from making sure Bob never gets to use his own account ever again? (Besides two-factor authentication, which most people don't use.)

Explanation / Answer

Essentially you're just talking about a very targeted Denial-of-Service. There would be plenty of ways to achieve this other than just locking out their account. If they were on the same network then there would be plenty of other ways to do it other than just locking out someones account

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