The exponentially growing concern of cyber-attacks on extremely dense underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) and the evolution of UWSNs digital threat landscape has brought novel research challenges and issues. Primarily, varied protocol evaluation under advanced persistent threats is now becoming indispensable yet very challenging. This research implements an active attack in the Adaptive Mobility of Courier Nodes in Threshold-optimized Depth-based Routing (AMCTD) protocol. A variety of attacker nodes were employed in diverse scenarios to thoroughly assess the performance of AMCTD protocol. The protocol was exhaustively evaluated both with and without active attacks with benchmark evaluation metrics such as end-to-end delay, throughput, transmission loss, number of active nodes and energy tax. The preliminary research findings show that active attack drastically lowers the AMCTD protocol's performance (i.e., active attack reduces the number of active nodes by up to 10%, reduces throughput by up to 6%, increases transmission loss by 7%, raises energy tax by 25%, and increases end-to-end delay by 20%).
Keywords: active attack; attacker nodes; malicious nodes; routing attack; security attack.