What term describes frequent SYN connection attempts to a range of destination ports in a short time?

• A. Ping Sweep
• B. Traceroute
• C. Port Scanning
• D. Denial of Service

Answer: (C)

Frequent SYN connection attempts to a range of destination ports in a short time are probing for which ports have services listening on a host, which is port scanning. By sending TCP connection attempts across many ports and observing responses (SYN-ACK for open ports, RST or no response for closed or filtered ports), you map out the available services on that system. This is different from a ping sweep, which uses ICMP to find live hosts rather than which ports are open; traceroute, which reveals the path to a destination by varying TTL; and a Denial of Service, which aims to overwhelm a target’s resources rather than discover open ports. So the described behavior best matches port scanning, often performed with a SYN scan to quickly identify open ports.