Network Administrator Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to CompTIA Network+® Skills, Second Edition

3.8. Task 3.8: Guarding against SYN Flood Attacks

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are not limited to ICMP-based "ping of death" assaults. In fact, there are various other methods to impair network performance intentionally. One example is the "smurf" attack, where the source addresses of ping packets are falsified, thus affecting the initial target and an ultimate target, whose source address was used falsely, that receives the responses to these requests. Another example, known as a "fraggle" attack, uses UDP-based directed broadcasts, or UDP echoes, to achieve the same result but usually on a smaller scale.

The topic of this task, however, is the SYN flood attack, in which the targeted machine is inundated with TCP segments requesting connections. ...