EC-Council Certified Incident Handler (ECIH) Practice Exam - Prep & Study Guide

Volumetric attacks are a type of Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) incident that is characterized by immense amounts of traffic aimed at overwhelming the target's bandwidth. These attacks are measured in bits per second (bps) because they focus on saturating the connection between the victim and the internet, effectively making resources unavailable to legitimate users by flooding the network with excessive traffic.

The goal of a volumetric attack is to consume bandwidth, either at the victim's server or within the infrastructure of the service provider. Typical examples include UDP floods, ICMP floods, and amplification attacks. Measuring these attacks in bps provides a clear metric for understanding the scale and impact of the attack on network resources.

In contrast, protocol attacks exploit weaknesses in network protocols, application layer attacks target specific applications or services, and transport layer attacks typically pertain to issues at the transport layer, such as SYN floods. While each of these attack types is significant and damaging, they do not primarily focus on overwhelming bandwidth in the same way that volumetric attacks do, and they may not be measured in pure bps.