Which family of attacks exhausts the target's bandwidth by consuming large amounts of traffic, either inside the target network or on the link to the Internet?

• A. Protocol Attacks
• B. Application Layer Attacks
• C. UDP flood
• D. Volumetric Attacks

Answer: (D)

Volumetric attacks aim to saturate the target’s available bandwidth by flooding it with enormous amounts of traffic, either within the target’s own network or on the link to the Internet. The key idea is volume — the goal is to exhaust the bandwidth so legitimate traffic can’t get through. Examples include floods of UDP or ICMP packets and amplification-based floods, all designed to push bandwidth to its limit.

This differs from protocol attacks, which try to disrupt services by overwhelming processing or state resources in network devices or servers through protocol-specific behavior. Application layer attacks focus on exhausting resources of a specific application (like a web server) rather than the network link’s capacity. A UDP flood is a concrete instance of a volumetric attack, but the category as a whole is about saturating bandwidth with high traffic volume.