You are monitoring your network's behavior. You find a sudden increase in traffic on the network. It seems to come in bursts and emanate from one specific machine. You have been able to determine…

Spyware silently collects and transmits user data in small amounts but does not generate the high-volume burst traffic pattern described.

A Ping Flood is a specific ICMP-based DoS technique, but it describes the attack method being executed against a victim, not the behavior of a compromised source machine.

Denial of Service attacks often leverage compromised machines called zombies or bots that are remotely controlled to flood targets with traffic, all without the machine owner's knowledge or involvement. The burst traffic pattern originating from a single machine whose user is unaware and technically unsophisticated is the classic signature of a bot participating in a coordinated DoS campaign.

Session Hijacking involves intercepting and taking over an authenticated session between two parties, producing no outbound burst traffic from the attacker's machine.