NETSCOUT® SYSTEMS, INC. released its first half 2026 Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) Threat Intelligence Report, revealing a significant shift in how attacks are launched and sourced. With more than 9.1 million DDoS attacks recorded globally by NETSCOUT between January and June 2026, the report highlights that DDoS risk is growing along three axes: the volume of traffic that must be inspected, the number of places where mitigation must be deployed, and the share of attacks that disrupt service without ever saturating a link.
“The 1,286 percent rise in attacks clearing 1Tbps or 1Gpps means high-capacity events are no longer anomalies; they are routine,” stated Hardik Modi, VP Engineering, DDoS solutions, and ASERT Threat Intelligence Team, NETSCOUT. “With the proliferation of residential proxies and short, rate-based attacks from DDoS-for-hire platforms, traditional coarse network controls are insufficient. Providers and enterprises alike need finer-grained, selective mitigation and increased scrubbing capacity at network edges to combat these qualitative shifts in attack sophistication.”
