Which term describes obscuring the attacker’s source IP address?

• A. Backscatter
• B. IP Flood
• C. Spoofing
• D. None of the above

Answer: (C)

IP spoofing is the practice of forging the source IP address in packets to hide where traffic is actually coming from. This directly describes obscuring the attacker’s origin, making it harder to trace and sometimes enabling abuse like reflection or amplification attacks. Backscatter is a side effect—the unexpected traffic that returns to the spoofed address as a consequence of spoofing—not the act of hiding the source itself. A flood describes the volume of packets, not the method used to conceal identity. So the term that best fits the description is IP spoofing.