200-201 practice question 34 of 35

What are two denial of service attacks? (Choose two.)

Full set: 505 questions
Answer options
A: MITM
B: TCP connections
C: ping of death Correct answer
D: UDP flooding Correct answer
E: code red
Correct Answer:
C. ping of death; D. UDP flooding
Explanation

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Ping of death is a classic DoS attack where an attacker sends a malformed, oversized ICMP packet to a target system. The target system's inability to properly handle the anomalous packet causes it to crash or freeze, resulting in a denial of service. UDP flooding is a DoS attack where the attacker overwhelms the target with a large volume of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets. The target system expends its resources attempting to process these packets and respond with ICMP "Destination Unreachable" messages, ultimately becoming unavailable to legitimate traffic.

Why Incorrect

A. MITM: A Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack is primarily an eavesdropping or impersonation attack, where the goal is to intercept and potentially alter communications, not to make a service unavailable.
B. TCP connections: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections are a fundamental component of network communication, not an attack. While they can be exploited (e.g., in a TCP SYN flood), the term itself is not an attack.
E. code red: Code Red is the name of a specific computer worm from 2001. While it included a DoS component, it is an instance of malware, not a general type or category of DoS attack like flooding.

References

1. Santos

O.

Stuppi

J.

& Pyles

R. (2020). Cisco CyberOps Associate CBROPS 200-201 Official Cert Guide. Cisco Press.

Chapter 5

"Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

" Page 128: "The ping of death is a classic DoS attack... The target system would not know how to handle the oversized packet and would crash."

Chapter 5

"UDP Flood Attacks

" Page 129: "A UDP flood attack is a session-based DoS attack that is executed by sending a large number of UDP packets to a remote host."

Chapter 5

"Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

" Page 133: This section describes MITM as an attack where the "attacker is positioned in the communication path between two devices

" clearly distinguishing it from DoS.

2. Kurose

J. F.

& Ross

K. W. (2017). Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (7th ed.). Pearson.

Chapter 1

Section 1.6.2

"Security

" Page 59: Describes Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks

including sending "a deluge of packets to the targeted host... swamping the target’s access link" (as in UDP flooding) or sending "a few maliciously chosen packets" (as in the ping of death).

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