Which of the following is a type of denial-of-service attack that relies on a spoofed IP source to overwhelm a victim with responses?

• A. Ping of Death
• B. Smurf flood
• C. Reflection attack
• D. DDoS using botnets

Answer: (C)

The key idea is using forged source addresses to direct responses to the target. In a reflection attack, the attacker sends requests to third‑party servers with the victim’s IP as the source. Those servers then reply to the victim, overwhelming them with traffic. The spoofed IP lets the attacker hide their identity while turning innocent services into amplifiers for the target.

Ping of Death isn’t about misdirected responses; it’s an old fragmentation exploit that overloads a victim’s system with oversized packets. A Smurf flood is indeed a reflection-type tactic that uses a broadcast address to provoke many replies to the spoofed target, but the broader, more general mechanism described—responses sent to the spoofed address by multiple reflectors—fits the reflection attack concept. DDoS with botnets relies on many devices, not specifically on spoofed-response amplification.