Possibly due to MAC flooding attack - a kind of Unicast flood attack where an attacker would exhaust space in the MAC allocation table of a switch, so not being able to find the right address in the address cache (all were supplied by the attacker), it would flood the packet out to all ports. After most/all/target legitimate MACs were forced out of the table, it's a nice time to start a packet sniffer as the previously unavailable packets that were spat out by the switch are purportedly available for capture. Even if no packet capture intended this is already a type of DoS attack, esp. in large networks (due to the number of clients talking to the switch), which certainly degrades network performance.
JSmyth
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