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Resources Limitations and Flooding

Flooding attacks are a form of denial-of-service attack that exhaust a device's resources—memory, CPU, bandwidth, or storage—by overwhelming it with excessive requests until it can no longer serve legitimate traffic. Tools originally built for application stress testing, such as JMeter and Load Ninja, can be repurposed by attackers to carry out these attacks.

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About this video

Flooding attacks are a category of denial-of-service attack built around a straightforward principle: every networked device operates within fixed resource limits, and when those limits are reached, the device can no longer function normally. By deliberately saturating a target's memory, CPU cycles, bandwidth, or storage capacity with an overwhelming volume of requests, an attacker effectively shuts down access for legitimate users without needing to exploit a software vulnerability. The mechanics of a flooding attack can take several forms, including sending massive volumes of ping packets, opening large numbers of connections simultaneously, or generating sustained request traffic that the target cannot process fast enough to clear. The tools used to execute these attacks are often the same ones found in legitimate development and QA workflows. Applications like JMeter, Load Ninja, and Web Load were built to help developers stress-test servers and applications before deployment, verifying that a system can handle peak demand. Because these tools are widely available and require no special privileges to operate, they are equally accessible to attackers looking to weaponize that same capability. Understanding flooding attacks is foundational to broader denial-of-service defense, since resource exhaustion remains one of the most direct and effective methods for taking a system offline. Recognizing both the technical mechanisms and the dual-use nature of stress-testing software is essential for security professionals responsible for protecting network infrastructure and maintaining service availability.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Flooding Attacks (DoS)

Key terms

Denial of Service
DoS
An attack that floods a system or network with traffic to make it unavailable to legitimate users.
Availability
The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
Bandwidth
The maximum rate of data transfer across a network path, typically measured in bits per second.
Internet Control Message Protocol
ICMP
A network layer protocol used to send error messages and operational information about network conditions.
Flooding Attack
A type of denial of service attack that overwhelms a target device by sending excessive requests or traffic until its resources are exhausted and it can no longer serve legitimate users.
Stress Testing
The practice of deliberately overwhelming a system with high volumes of requests to evaluate its performance limits; the same tools can be weaponized to conduct flooding-based DoS attacks.

Topics

Denial Of Service Flooding Attacks Resource Exhaustion Stress Testing Tools Network Security Cybersecurity

Transcript

One way to carry out a denial of service attack is by overwhelming some sort of resource. A lot of times we call that a flooding attack.

Devices on a network have a limited number of resources. They have a limited amount of memory, CPU, bandwidth, storage. So somehow, if we can overwhelm those resources and use them all up, what that essentially does is shut down these services so that they're not available for other people who are trying to legitimately access these resources. So there is a limited number of resources that we can leverage to carry out an attack.

One way to really exhaust the amount of resources that some device has is by flooding it with a ton of requests. For instance, maybe we're pinging it, and we're pinging it with so many ping packets that it doesn't have time to respond. Or maybe we're opening up certain connections. Whatever the case may be, we're filling up its resources, whether it be memory, CPU, bandwidth, or storage.

Stress testing software

Software that allows us to do this type of thing would be like JMeter, or Load Ninja, or Web Load, Neolo, or there's several more. Essentially, all of these are stress testing software. The purpose of most of this software is to do stress testing. That is, if we were a developer on a network and we were developing some sort of application that was running on a server, we would want to make sure that our application could withstand a bunch of requests, to see what would happen if it got overwhelmed with that amount of requests. So we would use this software to conduct some sort of stress testing on this machine.

But of course, since we can do this as a regular user, we can also do it as an attacker. So an adversary could use this stress testing software to overwhelm a machine and bring it down to its knees.

Flooding attacks are these type of attacks that are really a type of denial of service attack, where you just overwhelm whatever resource it is. So if it's a server, or maybe it's some sort of device on the network, you overwhelm it to the point where it exhausts its resources and then can't do any kind of legitimate traffic or service any kind of legitimate users on the network.

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