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George, a certified security professional, was hired by an organization to ensure that the server accurately responds to customer requests. In this process, George employed a security solution to monitor the network traffic toward the server. While monitoring the traffic, he identified attack signatures such as SYN flood and ping of death attempts on the server.
Which of the following categories of suspicious traffic signature has George identified in the above scenario?
Denial-of-service (DoS) is the category of suspicious traffic signature that George identified in the above scenario. DoS signatures are designed to detect attempts to disrupt or degrade the availability or performance of a system or network by overwhelming it with excessive or malformed traffic. SYN flood and ping of death are examples of DoS attacks that exploit the TCP/IP protocol to consume the resources or crash the target server. A SYN flood attack sends a large number of TCP SYN packets to the target server, without completing the three-way handshake, thus creating a backlog of half-open connections that exhaust the server's memory or bandwidth. A ping of death attack sends a malformed ICMP echo request packet that exceeds the maximum size allowed by the IP protocol, thus causing the target server to crash or reboot. DoS attacks can cause serious damage to the organization's reputation, productivity, and revenue, and should be detected and mitigated as soon as possible123. Reference:
Network Defense Essentials Courseware, EC-Council, 2020, pp. 3-33 to 3-34
What is a denial-of-service attack?, Cloudflare, 2020
Denial-of-service attack - Wikipedia, Wikipedia, March 16, 2021