A security technician at a small business is worried about the Layer 2 switches in the network suffering from a DoS style attack caused by staff incorrectly cabling network connections between…

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP - IEEE 802.1D) detects redundant paths between Layer 2 switches and logically blocks ports to eliminate loops before they form. Without STP, a miscabled loop would cause frames to circulate indefinitely, generating broadcast storms that consume all available bandwidth and crash the network. STP automatically recalculates topology if physical connections change, providing continuous loop prevention.

Flood guards protect against MAC address table flooding attacks where an attacker sends frames with spoofed source MACs to overflow the CAM table; they do not address physical cabling loops.

Access control lists (ACLs) filter traffic based on defined rules at Layer 3 or higher and have no mechanism to detect or prevent Layer 2 switching loops.

SYN flood is the name of a denial-of-service attack technique, not a switch mitigation feature.