Refer to the exhibit. An engineer received a ticket about a slowed-down web application. The engineer runs the #netstat - an command. How must the engineer interpret the results?

A large number of connections overwhelming a server, causing slowdowns, is a strong indicator of malicious activity rather than common, legitimate traffic.

While gathering more data is generally useful, the `netstat -an` output with numerous connections or specific connection states is a direct diagnostic indicator of a DoS attack.

A web application server experiencing a denial-of-service (DoS) attack will typically show a high number of half-open connections (SYN_RECV state) or an excessive number of established connections from various sources. These connections consume system resources, leading to the reported slowdowns and preventing legitimate users from accessing the application.

A man-in-the-middle attack involves intercepting traffic between two parties, which would not typically manifest as an overwhelming number of connections *to* the web server itself in a `netstat -an` output.