Which network attack below would NOT be considered a Denial of Service attack?

A.
Ping of Death

B.
SMURF

C.
TCP SYN

D.
Brute Force

Explanation:
A brute force attack is an attempt to use all combinations of key patterns to decipher a message. The
other three attacks are commonly used to create a Denial of Service (DoS). * Ping of Death, exploits
ICMP by sending an illegal ECHO packet of >65K octets of data, which can cause an overflow of
system variables and lead to a system crash. * SMURF, is a type of attack using spoofed ICMP ECHO
requests to broadcast addresses, which the routers attempt to propagate, congesting the network.
Three participants are required for a SMURF attack: the attacker, the amplifying network, and the
victim. * a TCP SYN flood attack, generates phony TCP SYN packets from random IP addresses at a
rapid rate to fill up the connection queue and stop the system from accepting legitimate users.
Source: Hacking Exposed by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, and George Kurtz (Osborne, 1999).