Which term describes an attack that overwhelms a target's network capacity to prevent legitimate access?

Which term describes an attack that overwhelms a target's network capacity to prevent legitimate access?

• A. Port scanning
• B. Hash collision
• C. Packet flooding
• D. SQL injection

Answer: (C)

Packet flooding describes an attack that overwhelms a target’s network capacity by pushing a flood of traffic to the victim. By sending large volumes of packets—such as UDP, ICMP, or TCP SYN bursts—the attacker saturates bandwidth and exhausts processing resources, making legitimate requests slow or impossible to satisfy. This is a network-layer threat aimed at denying service, not at exploiting application logic. It differs from other terms: port scanning simply probes which ports are open; a hash collision involves cryptographic hash functions producing the same digest and has no relation to flooding network resources; SQL injection targets a back-end database through malicious input and is an application-layer vulnerability, not a network capacity issue. Understanding packet flooding helps you recognize denial-of-service scenarios and the typical defenses, like rate limiting, filtering, and traffic scrubbing to separate malicious from legitimate traffic.

Packet flooding describes an attack that overwhelms a target’s network capacity by pushing a flood of traffic to the victim. By sending large volumes of packets—such as UDP, ICMP, or TCP SYN bursts—the attacker saturates bandwidth and exhausts processing resources, making legitimate requests slow or impossible to satisfy. This is a network-layer threat aimed at denying service, not at exploiting application logic. It differs from other terms: port scanning simply probes which ports are open; a hash collision involves cryptographic hash functions producing the same digest and has no relation to flooding network resources; SQL injection targets a back-end database through malicious input and is an application-layer vulnerability, not a network capacity issue. Understanding packet flooding helps you recognize denial-of-service scenarios and the typical defenses, like rate limiting, filtering, and traffic scrubbing to separate malicious from legitimate traffic.