What is the intent of a basic SYN flood attack?

Soliciting DNS responses is a characteristic of DNS-based attacks like amplification or cache poisoning, not a SYN flood.

A basic SYN flood attack exploits the TCP three-way handshake by sending numerous SYN requests without completing the final ACK, causing the target server to allocate resources for many half-open connections. The intent is to exceed the threshold limit of the server's connection queue, preventing legitimate incoming connections and resulting in a denial-of-service.

Flushing the register stack or re-initiating buffers describes low-level system operations and is not the direct objective of a SYN flood, which focuses on exhausting network connection resources.

Causing a buffer overflow is a distinct type of attack that exploits memory handling vulnerabilities, whereas a SYN flood targets connection state tables to achieve denial of service.