At Liberty Mutual ' s cybersecurity operations center in Boston, network engineer Marcus is troubleshooting...

The symptoms strongly match MAC flooding, a classic Layer 2 sniffing-related attack discussed in CEH under switch-based network attacks. Ethernet switches maintain a CAM table that maps MAC addresses to physical switch ports. This table allows the switch to forward frames only to the correct destination port, preventing other hosts from seeing traffic not intended for them. In a MAC flooding attack, an attacker generates a very large number of frames with spoofed, random source MAC addresses. The goal is to overflow the switch CAM table so it can no longer reliably store legitimate MAC-to-port mappings.

When the CAM table is full or unstable, many switches fail open by flooding frames out of multiple ports, behaving more like a hub for unknown destinations. That leads to exactly what Marcus observes: devices on segments that should be isolated start receiving traffic they normally would not see, and overall performance degrades due to excessive broadcast-like forwarding. The prompt also mentions “abnormal traffic patterns overwhelming the network,” which aligns with the high-volume frame injection required to poison or overflow the CAM table.

ARP poisoning would primarily redirect traffic through the attacker by manipulating IP-to-MAC mappings within a VLAN, but it would not typically cause widespread flooding and generalized delays across multiple VLANs. DNS cache poisoning affects name resolution rather than Layer 2 forwarding behavior. Switch port stealing targets a specific victim MAC entry to redirect that host’s traffic, but the widespread flooding and overload indicators are more characteristic of MAC flooding. Therefore, MAC flooding is the most likely technique in this scenario.