Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a distributed architecture-less network having mobile nodes dynamically building up routes among themselves for transmission of packets. Security is the most crucial interest for its essential working. Due to its distinctive features including active network topology, lack of fixed/centralized authority, slower data transfer rate, a limited number of resources, bandwidth, and battery power, it is often attackable by malevolent nodes. Various types of attacks can affect network operations and make trans-reception untrustworthy. In order to obtain a more robust MANET operation through innovative design and development strategies, the study of severity of various attacks and their respective counter measures is necessary. This paper presents a detailed survey of TCP/IP layerwise attacks on MANET and the corresponding defence mechanisms. Further, a MANET scenario using a standard dynamic routing protocol Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is framed and tested under the routing disruption attacks viz. grayhole, blackhole, and cooperative blackhole. The attacks are simulated in the EXata environment to determine their prevalence over others in varying network scenarios. The comparative performance analysis is also carried out based on the measurements of the state-of-the-art evaluation metrics like Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, throughput, jitter, and the number of data packets dropped by malicious nodes. The presented work brings uniqueness where it covers a wide variety of attacks, respective defence mechanisms, and a successful practical demonstration to validate the severity of selective dominant attacks all at one place which is not found in earlier literature.