Which attack involves many hosts flooding a target with requests to overwhelm it?

• A. DDoS
• B. Spoofing
• C. Trojan Horse
• D. Virus

Answer: (A)

A distributed denial-of-service attack is when a target is overwhelmed by a flood of requests coming from many different hosts. The key idea is that hundreds or thousands of machines—often part of a botnet—pump traffic at once, exhausting the target’s bandwidth, processing power, or memory so legitimate users can’t get a response. This distributed nature makes it harder to block since the attack traffic seems to originate from many places and can saturate multiple routes to the victim.

This differs from spoofing, which is pretending to be someone else’s address; a Trojan Horse, which hides malicious software inside something legitimate; and a virus, which is self-replicating malware that spreads. In short, the scenario described is a denial-of-service attack that relies on many machines to overwhelm a target.