A retail website is knocked offline by traffic from thousands of compromised cameras at once. No data on the site was changed. Which attack is this?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
One shouting customer is a scene, and thousands of cameras shouting at the same door is a crowd. Your public site is knocked offline by that crowd, and nothing was rewritten, so this is a distributed denial-of-service attack. One source, a change to the data, or a single open service reflecting traffic does not describe this flood.
Full Explanation
A distributed denial-of-service attack comes from many compromised systems at once, here thousands of cameras, and its goal is to exhaust the site. The site is offline and no data was changed, so the impact is availability. A single-source attack can also knock a site offline, and it comes from one system. The thousands of cameras rule that out. Tampering would change site data. The stem says nothing was changed. A reflection attack is the tempting twin because the traffic can look like it comes from many places. The stem says the cameras are sending it, not that one open service is reflecting someone else's packets. Exam caveat: blocking one camera address does not stop a distributed flood. Operational check: confirm the inbound flood comes from many camera addresses, that the data hashes are unchanged, and that mitigation targets the volume rather than one source. A single open reflector would show a different source pattern than thousands of cameras each sending the flood on their own.