James works as a Database Administrator for Techsoft Inc. The company has a SQL Server 2005 computer. The computer has a database named Sales. Users complain that the performance of the database has…

A Denial-of-Service attack works by overwhelming a target system or network with a high volume of traffic or requests, consuming available bandwidth and system resources. The System Monitor showing a spike in network traffic is a classic indicator of a DoS attack in progress. This resource exhaustion directly causes the performance degradation reported by database users.

A SQL injection attack manipulates database queries through malicious input and would more likely cause unauthorized data access or corruption rather than a noticeable spike in network traffic.

An internal attack describes a threat originating from inside the organization and is a threat source category, not a specific attack type that uniquely explains high network traffic.

A virus infects files and can degrade performance, but it would not specifically manifest as increased network traffic in System Monitor without other supporting indicators.