What is a SYN flood attack, and how does Cloudflare defend against it?

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Grade: Education Subject: Support
What is a SYN flood attack, and how does Cloudflare defend against it?
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A SYN flood attack exploits the TCP handshake process, where attackers send a flood of SYN packets without completing the handshake. Cloudflare mitigates this by implementing SYN cookies and connection limits. SYN cookies allow Cloudflare to track incomplete connections and prevent attackers from exhausting server resources. Connection limits restrict the number of simultaneous connections from a single source.