Which attack is a large-scale, coordinated assault on availability launched from many compromised machines over the Internet?

Which attack is a large-scale, coordinated assault on availability launched from many compromised machines over the Internet?

• A. DoS attack
• B. DDoS attack
• C. ICMP flood attacks
• D. Ping of Death

Answer: (B)

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a large-scale, coordinated assault on availability launched from many compromised machines over the Internet. The defender faces a flood of traffic or requests coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, all working together under remote control (a botnet). Because the traffic originates from so many different machines across the globe, it’s harder to stop by blocking a single IP and the target’s bandwidth or resources get overwhelmed, making services unavailable to legitimate users. This contrasts with a normal denial-of-service, which typically comes from a single source and is easier to mitigate. An ICMP flood is one method that can be used in such attacks, but the defining trait here is the distributed, coordinated nature. Ping of Death is an antiquated, single-source vulnerability exploit, not a modern large-scale, multi-source intrusion.

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a large-scale, coordinated assault on availability launched from many compromised machines over the Internet. The defender faces a flood of traffic or requests coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, all working together under remote control (a botnet). Because the traffic originates from so many different machines across the globe, it’s harder to stop by blocking a single IP and the target’s bandwidth or resources get overwhelmed, making services unavailable to legitimate users. This contrasts with a normal denial-of-service, which typically comes from a single source and is easier to mitigate. An ICMP flood is one method that can be used in such attacks, but the defining trait here is the distributed, coordinated nature. Ping of Death is an antiquated, single-source vulnerability exploit, not a modern large-scale, multi-source intrusion.