Challenges
Low-Rate, High-Impact: The DDoS Threat You Don’t See Coming
Carpet bombing DDoS attacks use distributed, low-rate traffic to simultaneously target thousands of IP addresses. By staying below traditional thresholds, these attacks evade legacy DDoS detection tools, blend into background traffic, and overwhelm security teams with false positives and manual analysis.
For service providers and large networks, carpet bombing attacks threaten service availability, customer SLAs, and operational efficiency—especially when detection is delayed or mitigation lacks precision. Security teams need automated, scalable protection that can identify and stop these attacks without disrupting legitimate traffic.
NETSCOUT delivers automated, real-time detection and precision mitigation to stop carpet bombing DDoS attacks without disrupting legitimate traffic.
Outcomes That Matter
Automatic Mitigation with Precision
Maintain Network and Service Availability
Automatically detect and mitigate carpet bombing DDoS attacks before they degrade critical services, or customers.
Protect Customers Without Collateral Damage
Apply precise, mitigation that blocks only malicious traffic while preserving legitimate traffic.
Scale Managed DDoS Protection Services
Defend thousands of customer IPs simultaneously and support revenue-generating DDoS protection offerings.
NETSCOUT’s Solution and How It Delivers Value
Stop Carpet Bombing DDoS Without Disrupting Legitimate Traffic
NETSCOUT delivers purpose-built carpet bombing DDoS protection using pervasive network visibility, adaptive analytics, and automated mitigation.
NETSCOUT Arbor Sightline provides continuous visibility across backbone, peering, transit, and customer-edge environments. Using behavioral baselining and adaptive detection, it identifies distributed, low-rate anomalies across dynamically changing IP address ranges that indicate carpet bombing activity—even when individual traffic flows appear legitimate.
When an attack is detected, Arbor Sightline automatically orchestrates, mitigation through Arbor Threat Mitigation System (TMS) and network-based controls. Arbor TMS applies stateless, surgical filtering to block only malicious traffic across thousands of destinations, avoiding over-mitigation and minimizing false positives.
The solution is continuously enhanced by NETSCOUT’s ATLAS Intelligence Feed and Adaptive DDoS Protection capabilities for service providers, ensuring defenses evolve alongside attacker techniques. This integrated approach enables faster response, lower operational overhead, and consistent protection against one of the most evasive DDoS attack methods.
Related Products
Arbor Sightline DDoS Attack Detection Solution
AI/ML Driven Foundation for Networking & Security Visibility, Threat Management, DDoS Attack Detection & Revenue Generation
Arbor Threat Mitigation System
Adaptive mitigation protects your customers and ensures service availability and performance
ATLAS Intelligence Feed
Continuous global, AI-powered DDoS threat intelligence.
What Our Customers Are Saying
“As a Tier-1 Internet carrier supporting the majority of global Internet traffic, this continued collaboration reflects our ongoing investment in best-of-breed network security solutions to protect the technology ecosystem. Our partnership combines Arelion’s global network performance and NETSCOUT’s leading Arbor DDoS attack protection solutions to provide world-class experiences for our customers.”
Scott Nichols, Chief Commercial Officer at Arelion
Read the case study
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a carpet bombing DDoS attack?
A carpet bombing DDoS attack distributes low-rate traffic across many IP addresses simultaneously, making detection difficult for traditional threshold-based defenses.
Why are carpet bombing attacks hard to stop?
Each individual attack flow appears small and legitimate, allowing the attack to evade detection while collectively degrading services.
How does NETSCOUT detect carpet bombing DDoS attacks?
NETSCOUT uses behavioral baselining and adaptive analytics to identify distributed anomalies across thousands of destinations in real time.
Can mitigation be automated without blocking legitimate users?
Yes. Arbor TMS uses stateless, surgical filtering to block only malicious traffic while preserving legitimate access.
