Ethical Hacking Essentials Practice Test

What happens during a Smurf attack when responses are sent back to the victim?

1. The victim's bandwidth is overloaded

2. The victim's system is secured

3. The victim's data is encrypted

4. The victim's requests are prioritized

The correct answer is: The victim's bandwidth is overloaded

In a Smurf attack, the attacker exploits vulnerabilities in the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) by sending a large number of ping requests to the broadcast address of a network, using the victim's IP address as the source address. When responses are generated from the devices on the network to these ping requests, they are sent back to the victim's IP address. As a result, the victim's network becomes inundated with traffic because multiple devices respond simultaneously, overwhelming the victim's available bandwidth. This leads to a Denial of Service (DoS) condition, as the excess traffic prevents legitimate users from accessing the victim's resources. Therefore, the situation directly correlates to the victim's bandwidth being overloaded, which is why that answer is accurate. The other options do not align with the effects of a Smurf attack. The victim's system is not secured as the attack is specifically designed to compromise network availability. Data encryption is unrelated to this type of attack, as it focuses on traffic flooding rather than data security. Additionally, the prioritization of requests does not occur in this scenario; instead, the victim's ability to process legitimate requests is severely hindered.