ISC2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) Practice Question

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack attempts to exhaust a target's compute or network capacity by overwhelming it with a flood of traffic from many geographically dispersed sources. The sudden spike to 150 000 requests per minute, the large number of different source IP addresses, and the resulting resource exhaustion and service outages precisely match DDoS characteristics.

An insider threat would typically involve actions taken with legitimate, internal credentials and would not require traffic from thousands of external IPs. A zero-day exploit focuses on taking advantage of an unknown software vulnerability to gain unauthorized access or execute code; it does not inherently generate massive, distributed traffic surges. An advanced persistent threat (APT) relies on stealth and persistence to exfiltrate data over time and deliberately avoids causing noticeable service disruption. Therefore, the observed symptoms most closely align with a DDoS attack.