Ethical Hacking Essentials Practice Test

What form of attack did James use to disrupt the OT network by flooding it with requests?

1. Phishing attack

2. Denial-of-service attack

3. Man-in-the-middle attack

4. Session hijacking

The correct answer is: Denial-of-service attack

A denial-of-service attack is characterized by overwhelming a network or service with an excessive amount of requests, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate users. In this context, when James flooded the Operational Technology (OT) network with requests, he initiated a deliberate attempt to saturate the network, thus preventing access and disrupting normal operations. This kind of attack targets the availability aspect of the network, which is crucial in OT environments that rely on real-time data and operations. Phishing attacks, in contrast, involve tricking individuals into divulging sensitive information or credentials, which would not generally disrupt a network in the same way. Man-in-the-middle attacks focus on intercepting and potentially altering communication between two parties without their knowledge, while session hijacking involves taking control of a user's session after authentication. Both of these concepts are related to security breaches but do not directly involve overwhelming a network with traffic like a denial-of-service attack does.