Which specific attack floods a target with spoofed UDP packets directed at random ports with a large source IP range?

Which specific attack floods a target with spoofed UDP packets directed at random ports with a large source IP range?

• A. ICMP flood attacks
• B. Ping of Death
• C. UDP flood attack
• D. Smurf attack

Answer: (C)

Flooding a target with UDP datagrams is a UDP flood attack. UDP is a connectionless protocol, so attackers can blast a high volume of packets toward the victim without performing any handshake. When these packets arrive, the target may have to process each one and, if the destination port is closed, send back an ICMP Port Unreachable message, wasting CPU and bandwidth and exhausting resources. Sending to random ports increases the chance that many services will be invoked or provoked to respond, amplifying the impact. Using a large range of spoofed source IPs helps hide the attacker and makes filtering harder, which is common in UDP flood campaigns. In contrast, ICMP flood relies on ICMP traffic, Ping of Death targets oversized packets, and Smurf uses spoofed ICMP echo requests to a broadcast address to amplify responses, so they do not match the described UDP-to-random-ports, spoofed-source pattern.

Flooding a target with UDP datagrams is a UDP flood attack. UDP is a connectionless protocol, so attackers can blast a high volume of packets toward the victim without performing any handshake. When these packets arrive, the target may have to process each one and, if the destination port is closed, send back an ICMP Port Unreachable message, wasting CPU and bandwidth and exhausting resources. Sending to random ports increases the chance that many services will be invoked or provoked to respond, amplifying the impact. Using a large range of spoofed source IPs helps hide the attacker and makes filtering harder, which is common in UDP flood campaigns. In contrast, ICMP flood relies on ICMP traffic, Ping of Death targets oversized packets, and Smurf uses spoofed ICMP echo requests to a broadcast address to amplify responses, so they do not match the described UDP-to-random-ports, spoofed-source pattern.