The most severe form of SYN attack is the distributed SYN flood, one variety of distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). Like the SYN flood, the target receives a flood of SYN packets and the ACK+SYN replies are never answered. The attack is distributed across multiple sources sending SYN packets in a coordinated attack.

The distributed SYN flood is more difficult to defend against because multiple clients are capable of creating a larger volume of SYN packets than a single client. Even if the server can cope, the volume of traffic may overwhelm a point in the network upstream of the targeted server. The only defence against this is more bandwidth to prevent any choke‑points.