Evaggelia is analyzing the application logs for her web-based application and comes across the following string: ../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd What type of attack was likely attempted against Evaggelia's application?

The string shown in the logs is characteristic of a directory traversal attack where the attacker attempts to force the web application to navigate up the file hierarchy and retrieve a file that should not normally be provided to a web user, such as the password file. The series of double dots is indicative of a directory traversal attack because it is the character string used to reference the directory one level up in a hierarchy.