What is the purpose of an Internet Protocol (IP) spoofing attack?

Sending excessive data to overwhelm a process describes a buffer overflow attack, not IP spoofing.

Intercepting network traffic without authorization describes a packet sniffing or man-in-the-middle attack, which is a passive or interception-based technique rather than address forgery.

IP spoofing falsifies the source address, not the destination address; disguising the destination address does not accurately describe the mechanism or goal of IP spoofing.

IP spoofing works by falsifying the source IP address in packet headers so the receiving system believes the traffic originates from a trusted or known host. This deception is the core purpose of the attack, enabling the attacker to bypass trust-based authentication, hijack sessions, or facilitate other attacks like reflected DDoS by exploiting the target's belief in the sender's identity.