This scenario clearly aligns with a Pulse Wave DDoS attack, a sophisticated denial-of-service technique described in CEH v13 Network and Perimeter Hacking. Unlike traditional volumetric DDoS attacks that rely on sustained flooding, pulse wave attacks deliver short, extremely high-volume bursts of traffic, followed by periods of inactivity.
The defining characteristics described—intermittent spikes exceeding 300 Gbps, regular intervals (every 10 minutes), and temporary recovery—are hallmark indicators of pulse wave attacks. CEH v13 explains that attackers use this method to overwhelm server resources, trigger auto-scaling failures, exhaust mitigation thresholds, and evade detection systems that rely on sustained traffic baselines.
Option A is incorrect because UDP floods are continuous. Option B (HTTP GET flood) targets the application layer with sustained requests. Option C (PDoS) permanently damages hardware, which does not match the recurring pattern.
Pulse wave attacks are particularly effective against large platforms like streaming services because they:
Exploit elasticity limits of cloud infrastructure
Confuse rate-based detection systems
Cause repeated service degradation without long attack durations
CEH v13 emphasizes that pulse wave attacks are difficult to mitigate without adaptive, behavior-based DDoS protection. Therefore, Option D is the correct and CEH-aligned answer.
