DDoS attacks are increasing, but the headline figure of 41 percent is not confirmed by the official datasets reviewed. NETSCOUT recorded a 30% rise in volumetric attacks in the first half of 2024 compared with the first half of 2023. Cloudflare reported a 53% increase in attacks during 2024 and a 358% year-over-year increase in the first quarter of 2025. Those figures come from different provider networks, definitions and reporting periods, so they are not interchangeable.
What the latest DDoS numbers actually show
DDoS statistics are measurements from individual providers, not a single global census. A provider may count network-layer events, HTTP requests, unique attack fingerprints or mitigated incidents. Cloudflare says one campaign can produce multiple real-time fingerprints, which can increase its reported attack count.
| Provider and period | Reported result | What it measures or qualifies |
|---|---|---|
| NETSCOUT, 1H 2024 versus 1H 2023 | 30% increase | Observed volumetric DDoS attacks in NETSCOUT telemetry |
| NETSCOUT ASERT, 2024 | Approximately 41,000 attacks per day | Daily global observation rate |
| NETSCOUT, 1H 2025 | More than 8 million attacks; more than 50 events above 1 Tbps | Global observations for that six-month period |
| Cloudflare, 2024 versus 2023 | 21.3 million attacks; 53% increase | Attacks blocked by Cloudflare during 2024 |
| Cloudflare, Q1 2025 versus Q1 2024 | 20.5 million attacks; 358% increase | Cloudflare-blocked attacks in the quarter; the total was 96% of Cloudflare’s entire 2024 count |
| Cloudflare, 2025 report | 121% year-over-year increase | Increase stated in Cloudflare’s 2025 reporting period; it is not the same series as NETSCOUT’s 1H 2024 comparison |
The defensible conclusion is that DDoS activity is rising sharply. The exact 41% figure should be treated as unverified unless a separate authoritative source defines its dataset and period.
Why DDoS activity is growing
Automation lowers the cost of launching attacks
Botnets, DDoS-for-hire services and shared attack infrastructure let comparatively small groups generate large campaigns repeatedly. NETSCOUT director of threat intelligence Richard Hummel said, “As hacktivist groups leverage more automation, shared infrastructure, and evolving tactics, organizations must recognize that traditional defenses are no longer sufficient.”
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Geopolitical events create sudden campaign spikes
NETSCOUT’s first-half 2025 reporting links large campaigns to geopolitical conflicts. It recorded more than 880 bot-driven attacks per day in March, with a peak of 1,600 in a day. These bursts can make quarterly or monthly growth rates look extreme even when activity is uneven across the year.
More compromised devices expand the attack supply
NETSCOUT ASERT reported a nearly 50% six-month increase in compromised attack assets in Asia-Pacific. Its 1H 2024 analysis also identified the Zergeca Go-language botnet, which used encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS and OpenNIC for command-and-control resolution. The result is a larger and more adaptable pool of residential, cloud and IoT devices.
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How modern attacks are changing
Network and application layers are attacked together
Network-layer floods target bandwidth or packet-processing capacity. Transport and protocol attacks exploit connection handling. HTTP DDoS attacks consume web-server, API or application resources with apparently valid requests. A campaign can switch among these layers or run them simultaneously, so a single bandwidth threshold does not describe the whole risk.
In Cloudflare’s Q1 2025 telemetry, 16.8 million of 20.5 million blocked attacks were network-layer events. In Q4 2024, 73% of HTTP attacks came from known botnets, showing why request-level identity, rate controls and bot intelligence matter alongside volumetric filtering.
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Carpet bombing and multi-vector campaigns spread the load
Instead of overwhelming one address, carpet bombing distributes traffic across many IP addresses or services. Attackers also combine amplification, protocol abuse, HTTP floods and several botnet sources. Distributed traffic can keep each individual signal below a simple per-host threshold while exhausting a shared link, firewall, load balancer or application tier.
Peak sizes are now measured in multiple terabits per second
- Cloudflare recorded a 5.6 Tbps attack in October 2024. It lasted 80 seconds and originated from more than 13,000 IoT devices.
- Cloudflare’s 2025 reporting recorded a 31.4 Tbps event lasting 35 seconds. The Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet was estimated at 1–4 million infected hosts, primarily Android TVs.
- NETSCOUT counted more than 50 attacks above 1 Tbps in the first half of 2025.
A short attack can still cause an outage if detection, routing changes or upstream filtering take longer than the event. Packet rate, connection rate and application work—not just terabits per second—must therefore be included in capacity planning.
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Which industries are being targeted?
Prominent targets in the reported telemetry include:
- Telecommunications, carriers and service providers: shared infrastructure creates a large blast radius, and attacks can be used for extortion, disruption or cover for intrusion.
- Gaming and gambling: public matchmaking, tournaments, betting windows and highly time-sensitive sessions make even brief latency spikes costly.
- Critical infrastructure: operators may have publicly reachable services, strict availability obligations and older operational technology that cannot be patched or rate-limited like a web application.
- Internet-facing enterprises: APIs, VPN gateways, DNS, customer portals and cloud workloads can each become an attack path.
Targeting varies by geography and reporting source; these sectors should not be read as a complete ranking of all victims.
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How to compare DDoS protection services
Compare a service against your traffic profile, architecture and recovery objectives rather than its largest marketing number. Ask for evidence under the following six axes.
| Comparison axis | Questions to ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Mitigation capacity | Can the provider absorb multi-terabit floods and high packet or connection rates? Is capacity available in the regions where you operate? | A large Tbps figure is irrelevant if packet processing, regional transit or your protected link fails first. |
| Detection and time to mitigation | What detects the event, how autonomous is the decision, and what is the measured time from signal to filtering or rerouting? | Short attacks can end before a manual workflow or DNS change takes effect. |
| Layer coverage | Does the service cover network, transport/protocol and HTTP/application attacks, including APIs and encrypted traffic? | Layer-specific protection prevents a network-only product from missing an application attack. |
| Botnet and threat intelligence | Can it identify known botnets, changing sources, spoofing, amplification and campaign relationships? What attribution or indicators are shared with your team? | Context helps distinguish a flash crowd from an attack and tune controls without blocking customers. |
| Sector and architecture resilience | Does the provider support telecom, carrier, gaming and critical-infrastructure designs, including BGP, DNS, on-premises and cloud scrubbing? | Protection must fit routing, latency, failover and regulatory constraints, not just a web reverse proxy. |
| Commercial and delivery model | Is mitigation metered or unmetered? Is traffic scrubbed through a cloud edge, GRE or direct-connect tunnel, an always-on service, or an on-demand diversion? | Billing surprises and slow diversion can undermine an otherwise capable service. |
What the named providers contribute
Cloudflare publishes large-scale mitigation telemetry and reports both network-layer and HTTP activity. NETSCOUT’s Arbor services and threat-intelligence work emphasize attack visibility, botnet activity, attribution context and carrier-scale observations. Obtain current architecture, service-level and pricing details directly from each provider; the public figures above are not a like-for-like performance test.
Quick Recap
What organizations should do now
- Map exposed services. List public IP ranges, DNS, VPN, APIs, game endpoints, carrier links and cloud dependencies. Identify which services share a link, firewall or origin.
- Set measurable objectives. Define acceptable latency, packet loss, connection rates and time to mitigation for each critical service, not only a maximum bandwidth number.
- Use layered controls. Combine upstream or edge scrubbing for volumetric traffic with protocol validation, rate limits, web application controls, bot management and origin protection.
- Prepare routing and communications. Document BGP or tunnel changes, DNS failover, provider contacts, evidence collection and customer-status updates. Keep an emergency path that does not depend on the attacked service.
- Test the runbook. Exercise detection, diversion, allowlists, rollback and post-incident logging with your DDoS provider and network team. Verify that legitimate high-volume events can be restored safely.
- Review intelligence after every event. Record vectors, source networks, fingerprints, packet and request rates, duration and controls that worked. Feed those indicators into monitoring and vendor reviews.
How to read future DDoS reports
- Check the provider, geography, attack definition and comparison period before comparing percentages.
- Separate attack count from attack size, duration and packet rate; a rise in one does not automatically imply the same rise in another.
- Look for methodology changes, such as fingerprint-based counting or expanded sensor coverage.
- Treat vendor telemetry as valuable operational evidence, not as a complete census of every attack worldwide.
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