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Preparing for Tomorrow’s DDoS: The Rise of Carpet Bombing Attacks
In today’s hyperconnected world, businesses rely on uninterrupted connectivity to serve customers, support employees, and deliver critical services. Yet Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to grow in scale and sophistication, threatening availability and trust. Among the most concerning of these tactics is Carpet Bombing DDoS, a technique that highlights how attackers are evolving faster than traditional defenses.
The Rise of Carpet Bombing DDoS Attacks
Unlike conventional volumetric DDoS attacks that target a single IP or endpoint, Carpet Bombing spreads the attack across a range of IPs within a network or subnet. This makes mitigation more complex, as it generates a “low-and-wide” traffic flood that can bypass detection thresholds. Consider the below scenario where the overall network capacity is 200 Mbps, with each individual host configured with a threshold of 25 Mbps. In a carpet bombing attack, traffic is spread across multiple IP addresses within the network rather than concentrated on a single target. At first glance, each host may only see around 20 Mbps of traffic—well within its 25 Mbps threshold, making the attack appear harmless at the host level. However, when aggregated, the total network load surges to 220 Mbps, far exceeding the 200 Mbps capacity. The result is a choked network pipeline, service disruption, and a cleverly disguised attack that slips past traditional detection thresholds. Hence, monitoring at the overall network level becomes critical.
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Recent incidents have shown that even a few hundred hijacked IoT devices can overwhelm multiple businesses simultaneously. This tactic not only disrupts services but also complicates the job of pinpointing the entry points and responding effectively—raising the stakes for enterprises and service providers alike.
Invisible Waves: Why Legacy Security Misses the Deadliest Carpet Bombing Attacks
Traditional security tools are built to recognize and respond to familiar patterns of DDoS activity, as massive surges of traffic directed at a single server, port, or application. Carpet bombing DDoS attacks, however, are designed to evade these conventional defenses by distributing malicious traffic thinly across hundreds or thousands of IP addresses within a network. Instead of overwhelming one target with a flood that is easy to spot, attackers generate many smaller streams of traffic that appear “legitimate” when viewed individually. Firewalls and intrusion detection systems typically rely on thresholds, signatures, or volume-based triggers, which fail to flag these low-intensity flows. As a result, each IP address looks healthy on its own, but collectively, the network suffers widespread disruption. Mitigation becomes equally complex, blocking a single address or subnet offers little relief, while trying to scale traditional filtering methods increases false positives and risks interrupting genuine traffic. This “low-and-wide” strategy highlights the blind spots of legacy security architectures, demonstrating why enterprises must adopt intelligent, AI-powered detection and distributed mitigation to stay ahead of evolving DDoS tactics like carpet bombing.
Safeguard your business against rising cyber threats.Carpet Bombing DDoS Mitigation: Do’s and Don’ts
| ✅ Do’s | ❌ Don’ts |
|---|---|
| Deploy edge scrubbing[RS2] to stop attacks closer to the source | Rely solely on centralised mitigation far from the attack surface |
| Use AI/ML-based anomaly detection for low-and-wide attack patterns | Depend on host-based static thresholds that miss distributed subnet floods |
| Monitor subnet-level traffic with granular visibility and real-time alerts | Ignore subtle deviations until full-scale outages occur |
| Integrate DDoS with CDN, WAAP, and bot management for layered protection | Treat DDoS in isolation without app-layer or content protection |
| Partner with providers offering strong SLAs and 24/7 DDoS expertise | Assume in-house resources can always handle large-scale, evolving attacks |
Other Evolving DDoS Tactics
- Multi-vector attacks: Combining volumetric, application-layer, and protocol-based assaults to overwhelm defenses on several fronts.
- Carpet Bombing 2.0: Targeting not just subnets but entire ranges of infrastructure assets.
- Botnet amplification: Leveraging IoT devices, cloud resources, or even DDoS-for-hire platforms to launch larger, distributed attacks.
- Application-layer (L7) attacks: Hitting business-critical apps (APIs, ecommerce, banking portals) to cause downtime without massive traffic volumes.
The Role of AI/ML in Next-Gen DDoS Defense
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are redefining DDoS protection. By learning normal traffic behaviors and identifying anomalies, AI enables faster detection of low-and-wide patterns like Carpet Bombing that might slip past static thresholds. ML models also improve over time, reducing false positives and ensuring genuine users aren’t blocked during an attack. In the future, AI-driven predictive analytics may even forewarn enterprises of impending DDoS attacks, enabling proactive countermeasures before an outage occurs.
How Tata Communications Can Help
Tata Communications offers carrier-grade DDoS protection built on a Tier-1 global backbone with 30% internet route share and native scrubbing nodes near the source, ensuring attacks are mitigated before they reach your business. Our profile-based detection helps mitigation of carpet bombing DDOS through comprehensive monitoring of the aggregated customer network for unusual traffic patterns. Our solutions combine real-time visibility, AI-driven traffic analysis, and multi-layered defenses across volumetric, application, and botnet-based threats. With industry-leading SLAs, 24/7 expert support, and unified customer control, Tata Communications empowers enterprises to not only withstand evolving DDoS tactics like Carpet Bombing but to maintain operational resilience and customer trust in a hyperconnected digital world.
Conclusion
Carpet Bombing and other evolving DDoS tactics underscore a simple truth: traditional defenses are no longer enough. Businesses need an intelligent, layered, and AI-augmented approach that not only stops today’s attacks but also anticipates tomorrow’s. The enterprises that act now will be the ones who thrive in an always-on digital future.
Protect your business from evolving DDoS threats with Tata Communications’ intelligent, AI-augmented ddos security solutions. Contact us today to learn how we can safeguard your digital infrastructure and ensure uninterrupted operations.