Earlier this month, a European DDoS mitigation service provider became the target of one of the most powerful distributed denial-of-service attacks ever recorded. At its peak, the assault pushed traffic levels to an astonishing 1.5 billion packets per second. Thanks to rapid intervention the attack was detected, analysed and neutralised before it could cause major disruption.
On the surface this might seem like just another entry in the ever-growing catalogue of cyber incidents. In reality, it is a warning shot. DDoS attacks have reached a scale that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and the numbers tell a sobering story. NETSCOUT reports that in the first half of 2025 alone, more than eight million DDoS attacks were observed globally, with over 3.2 million of those in the EMEA region. The growth curve is steep, and there is no sign of it flattening.
Why the Surge?
The rise in DDoS activity is not a mystery. At least four converging trends are driving this escalation.
First, the barrier to entry has collapsed. DDoS-for-hire services, sometimes branded as “stress testing tools,” are readily available on the dark web and in some cases on the open internet. For a modest fee, anyone — from disgruntled individuals to organised crime groups — can unleash significant disruption without deep technical expertise.
Second, the proliferation of connected devices has given attackers unprecedented firepower. The Internet of Things has exploded across homes, offices and industrial settings, yet many devices ship with poor security and remain unpatched. Botnets built on these weak links can marshal millions of endpoints, creating floods of traffic that overwhelm even well-provisioned targets.
Third, geopolitics has entered the fray. Nation-states and hacktivist collectives increasingly deploy DDoS as a tool of disruption, signalling power or protest without necessarily crossing the line into more destructive cyberattacks. From government websites to financial institutions and media outlets, the targets often reflect the political climate of the moment.
Finally, the attacks themselves are evolving. No longer confined to brute-force volumetric floods, many campaigns now combine multiple vectors, blending bandwidth saturation with application-layer assaults and protocol exploits. The aim is not only to overwhelm defences but also to confuse them, making mitigation harder and more resource-intensive.
The Cost of Disruption
The business impact of DDoS is both immediate and long-lasting. Outages caused by successful attacks can lead to lost transactions, abandoned customer sessions and reduced productivity. For e-commerce platforms, the financial toll can run into millions within hours. For critical services, such as healthcare or utilities, the stakes are even higher, as disruption can affect public safety.
Reputational damage lingers well beyond the incident. Customers may forgive a brief outage, but repeated disruptions raise questions about a company’s reliability. In regulated industries, downtime and unavailability may also attract scrutiny from oversight bodies. In Europe, for instance, the NIS2 Directive is pushing operators of essential services and digital infrastructure providers to demonstrate resilience against cyber threats, including DDoS. Failing to meet those obligations risks not only business continuity but also compliance penalties.
Building Real Resilience
So how can organisations respond to this rising tide? The answer lies in preparation, investment and mindset. DDoS should not be treated as a rare event or a problem for “someone else.” It must be recognised as a mainstream risk, and resilience must be embedded at every layer.
A robust strategy begins with visibility. Without real-time monitoring, organisations may not even realise an attack is underway until systems slow to a crawl or customers complain. Flow analytics and anomaly detection can flag unusual traffic patterns early, buying critical time to respond.
From there, mitigation capacity is essential. Few organisations can absorb the scale of modern DDoS traffic on their own. Cloud-based scrubbing services allow traffic to be rerouted, cleansed of malicious packets and delivered safely to its destination. This elasticity is vital when attacks spike into the hundreds of gigabits per second or, as in the recent European case, billions of packets per second.
Architectural choices also matter. Anycast routing, which distributes incoming traffic across multiple global locations, prevents attackers from overwhelming a single choke point. Redundancy, load balancing and geographic diversity are not luxuries but necessities in an era where service availability is constantly under threat.
Organisations must also test their defences under pressure. Just as fire drills prepare staff for emergencies, resilience testing ensures that both people and systems can withstand stress. Tabletop exercises, red-team simulations and stress tests reveal weaknesses before attackers do.
Finally, resilience depends on the wider ecosystem. Businesses should scrutinise their ISPs, hosting companies and cloud partners to ensure that upstream providers can support them in an emergency. DDoS mitigation is not a single-vendor solution but a collaborative effort across the supply chain.
Looking Ahead
The attempted 1.5 billion PPS attack is a glimpse of the future. As bandwidth grows, devices multiply and threat actors innovate, the ceiling for DDoS will only rise. Machine learning and automation may allow attackers to adapt in real time, shifting vectors as defenders respond. At the same time, defenders are advancing their own capabilities, using AI-driven detection, behavioural analysis and distributed cloud infrastructures to fight back.
The battle is not one that will ever be “won.” Instead, it will be managed, a constant cycle of preparation, defence, adaptation and learning. Those who view DDoS as a passing problem are likely to be caught off guard. Those who embed resilience into their operations will treat attacks not as existential crises but as challenges to be overcome.
Conclusion
The surge in DDoS activity is not just about bigger numbers or more frequent attacks. It is about the evolving nature of risk in a digital-first economy. Businesses, governments and service providers alike must accept that denial-of-service campaigns are now part of the cyber threat landscape, as inevitable as phishing emails or malware probes.
What distinguishes the resilient from the vulnerable is not whether they are targeted, but how they respond. Organisations that invest in monitoring, scalable defences and disciplined planning can weather these storms with confidence. Those that fail to adapt may find themselves offline, facing frustrated customers, angry regulators and damaged reputations.
The rising tide of DDoS is here. The only question is whether your organisation is ready to stand against it.
If you’d like to learn more about DDoS threats and how vXtream can help safeguard your business, get in touch with our experts today.
Image by Cliff Hang from Pixabay
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