This read-only object identifies which specific denial-of-service attack pattern (such as land-attack, smurf-attack, or ping-death-attack) a given row of the DoS-prevention control table applies to. It serves as the descriptive key for each row, letting an admin see at a glance which attack signature the accompanying state, action, and counter values in that same row belong to. For instance, a row where swDoSCtrlType reads tcp-syn-with-data(19) reports the enable state and hit count specifically for TCP SYN packets carrying payload data.