A malicious system continuously sends an extremely large number of SYN packets to a server. Which of the following BEST describes the resulting effect?

While a large volume of traffic can consume bandwidth, the primary impact of a SYN flood on the server is the exhaustion of its internal connection state resources, not necessarily the consumption of network bandwidth by the small SYN packets themselves.

A SYN flood aims to exhaust connection resources rather than overwhelm a firewall's ability to filter traffic based on the amount of data transmitted, as individual SYN packets are small.

SYN packets are not typically fragmented, and a SYN flood does not primarily involve fragmented packets or their reassembly; this describes a different type of attack.

During a SYN flood attack, the server receives numerous SYN packets and responds with SYN-ACKs, allocating memory and resources to maintain the state of each 'half-open' connection in its SYN queue, waiting for the final ACK. Since the attacker never sends the final ACK, these half-open connections accumulate, eventually exhausting the server's memory and connection table limits, preventing legitimate clients from establishing new connections.