CAPEC-125
Flooding
An adversary consumes the resources of a target by rapidly engaging in a large number of interactions with the target. This type of attack generally exposes a weakness in rate limiting or flow. When successful this attack prevents legitimate users from accessing the service and can cause the target to crash. This attack differs from resource depletion through leaks or allocations in that the latter attacks do not rely on the volume of requests made to the target but instead focus on manipulation of the target's operations. The key factor in a flooding attack is the number of requests the adversary can make in a given period of time. The greater this number, the more likely an attack is to succeed against a given target.
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Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-125: Flooding: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/125.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/125?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.
Prerequisites
Any target that services requests is vulnerable to this attack on some level of scale.
Resources required
A script or program capable of generating more requests than the target can handle, or a network or cluster of objects all capable of making simultaneous requests.
Consequences
| Impact | Affects | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Unreliable Execution, Resource Consumption | Availability | A successful flooding attack compromises the availability of the target system's service by exhausting its available resources. |
Mitigations
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale configured.
Specify expectations for capabilities and dictate which behaviors are acceptable when resource allocation reaches limits.
Uniformly throttle all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Weaknesses it exploits
- CWE-404 Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Recent CVEs with these weaknesses
- –CVE-2026-86531
The embedded OpenEJB HTTP server does not limit the size of incoming request bodies or of multipart requests, and does not remove the temporary files it creates for multipart parts. A remote unauthenticated attacker can cause excessive mem…
- 7.0CVE-2026-114359
Eclipse Kura downloads deployment packages (DPs) from a remote URL without any limit on the size of the data it receives. A malicious or compromised HTTP(S) server, or an attacker able to tamper with a plain-HTTP download, can stream an ar…
- 8.7CVE-2026-60040
An unauthenticated remote attacker can perform a DoS in the backends backup creation function. This can result in a total loss of availability.
- 8.7CVE-2026-123817
AIOHTTP is an asynchronous HTTP client/server framework for asyncio and Python. Prior to 3.14.4, the WebSocket reader retains one bytes object for each transport read while reassembling an incomplete frame. A malicious peer can split a fra…
- 6.8CVE-2026-125205
FFmpeg through 9.0.2 contains an unbounded memory allocation vulnerability in the av1_frame_merge bitstream filter that allows attackers to exhaust memory by never sending a temporal delimiter OBU. Attackers can supply a crafted .obu file …
- 5.7CVE-2026-125186
FFmpeg through 9.0.2 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in the dts2pts bitstream filter that allows attackers to exhaust CPU through unbounded per-packet POC node allocation. Attackers can supply a crafted H.264 pa…
- 6.8CVE-2026-125180
FFmpeg 8.1 through 9.0.2 contains a memory exhaustion vulnerability in the libavcodec/exif.c parser that allows attackers to amplify allocations by pointing many IFD entries at overlapping payloads. Attackers can embed a small crafted EXIF…
- 7.5CVE-2026-112322
clean_client() in lib/rpc/svc_auth_gssapi.c in MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) restarts its scan from the head of the client list after each removal, resulting in quadratic CPU cost. Remote attackers can cause a denial of service (CPU consumptio…
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