A syn-flood is a stream of packets that each initiate a new TCP session, but no follow-up packets are sent to complete the connection handshake.

Targetted at a service port, this will usually overload the server such that it cannot respond to any real connection requests from real clients because the server can only keep a limited number of connection slots active at any one time.

A syn-flood is a class of attack known as a denial of service attack. The origin for syn-flood packets can be set to any address on the net, making location of the source of a syn-flood attack, difficult.

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by edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2004-02-01 05:09:24