This is also a type of Denial of service (DoS) attack.

Buffer Overflow Attack:

The most common kind of DoS attack is simply to send more traffic to a network address than the programmers who planned its data buffers anticipated. The attacker may be aware that the target system has a weakness that can be exploited, or the attacker may simply try the attack in the hope that it might work. When the system receives a large amount of data that it cannot handle, the system may crash, keeping users from accessing its resources.