Large distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming much more common, according to new threat data released October 14.
NETSCOUT’s first-half 2026 report says its ATLAS system recorded more than 9.1 million DDoS attacks across 209 countries and territories from January through June. Attacks exceeding either 1 Tbps or 1 Gpps increased 1,286% year over year. NETSCOUT also recorded its first IPv6 attack above 1 Tbps, while active IPv6 mitigation increased more than 300%.
NETSCOUT’s own Reddit account explains why absorbing traffic through a CDN is not the same as purpose-built DDoS mitigation.
The report also says direct-path techniques represented 64.4% of observed attacks and that events lasting one minute or less increased from 1.6% of attacks in the second half of 2025 to 3.1% in the first half of 2026.
The direction is supported by separate industry data. Cloudflare reported 935 network-layer attacks above 1 Tbps during the same six-month period, including 805 in the second quarter alone. The two companies measure different networks and use different methodologies, so their total attack counts should not be compared directly.
For defenders, the trend makes basic architecture more important: Anycast can spread traffic geographically, a CDN can add distributed capacity, and resilient DNS prevents one overloaded service from becoming a wider outage.
NETSCOUT explains how botnet-driven DDoS tactics are changing and why automated mitigation matters.
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