Ethical Hacking Essentials Practice Test

What type of attack floods a victim's ability to reassemble fragmented packets, resulting in reduced performance?

1. Ping of Death

2. Fragmentation Attack

3. SYN Flood Attack

4. Permanent DoS (PDoS) Attack

The correct answer is: Fragmentation Attack

The type of attack that floods a victim's ability to reassemble fragmented packets is known as a fragmentation attack. This attack exploits the way that data is divided into smaller packets for transmission over a network. When a large packet is too big to meet the maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a network, it gets fragmented into smaller packets. In a fragmentation attack, an attacker deliberately sends a large number of fragmented packets to the target system. The system has to allocate resources to process and reassemble these fragments, which can overwhelm its capacity and lead to degraded performance or even a denial of service. Such attacks are particularly effective against systems with limited resources, as they create unnecessary overhead in managing the fragments instead of focusing on legitimate traffic. Other forms of attacks mentioned, like a ping of death, involve sending malformed packets that can crash systems, while SYN flood attacks target the TCP handshake process, and permanent DoS (PDoS) attacks are geared towards permanently damaging a target device. These attacks do not specifically focus on exploiting the packet reassembly process like fragmentation attacks do.