After a large influx of network traffic to externally facing devices, a security engineer begins investigating what appears to be a denial of service attack. When the packet capture data is…

Traffic fragmentation involves breaking up packets into smaller pieces to bypass security controls, which is not described here.

Port scanning involves probing ports to discover open services, but a 'large influx of traffic' with 'a single SYN packet to each port' strongly suggests an attempt to overwhelm resources rather than just discovery, making SYN flood more precise in the context of a DoS attack.

Host profiling involves gathering information about a target system (e.g., OS, services) which may include scanning but is not the direct attack described.

A SYN flood attack involves sending a high volume of TCP SYN packets to a target system but never completing the three-way handshake, leading the target to keep many half-open connections, exhausting its resources and causing a denial of service.