Which attack involves flooding the target with TCP or UDP fragments to prevent proper reassembly and degrade performance?

Which attack involves flooding the target with TCP or UDP fragments to prevent proper reassembly and degrade performance?

• A. SYN Flood Attack
• B. Fragmentation Attack
• C. HTTP GET Attack
• D. Zero-Day DDoS Attack

Answer: (B)

Fragmentation floods test the target’s ability to reassemble IP fragments. By sending a flood of TCP or UDP fragments, the attacker forces the host to buffer, sort, and reassemble many pieces of traffic. The reassembly process is resource-intensive, so a high volume of fragments can consume memory and CPU, saturating buffers and delaying or dropping legitimate packets. This leads to degraded performance and potential denial of service. Other attack types operate at different layers or mechanisms. A SYN flood overwhells the connection management state by abusing the TCP handshake, an HTTP GET flood overwhelms the application layer with requests, and a generic Zero-Day DDoS label doesn’t describe a specific fragmentation-based method. Fragmentation-based attacks specifically exploit the reassembly process to impact service availability.

Fragmentation floods test the target’s ability to reassemble IP fragments. By sending a flood of TCP or UDP fragments, the attacker forces the host to buffer, sort, and reassemble many pieces of traffic. The reassembly process is resource-intensive, so a high volume of fragments can consume memory and CPU, saturating buffers and delaying or dropping legitimate packets. This leads to degraded performance and potential denial of service.

Other attack types operate at different layers or mechanisms. A SYN flood overwhells the connection management state by abusing the TCP handshake, an HTTP GET flood overwhelms the application layer with requests, and a generic Zero-Day DDoS label doesn’t describe a specific fragmentation-based method. Fragmentation-based attacks specifically exploit the reassembly process to impact service availability.