If one wants to know about how severe DDoS attacks have been, here are some numbers from Cloudflare: In the first quarter of 2025, the company blocked 20.5 million DDoS attacks. As per the company, it is a 358% year-over-year (YoY) increase and a 198% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) increase. And these numbers are from just one (albeit a very big) company. And it is not just the numbers, the size and sophistication of attacks have been on the rise. Cloudflare itself saw off an attack measuring an astounding 7.3 terabits per second in January 2025. Not only the attack sizes, but the attacks themselves have also evolved from the old brute force methods. Modern technologies are allowing the attackers to launch attacks that are automated, intelligent, and are driven by botnets that evolve faster than legacy defenses.’ Are we really sure that legacy systems can weather such attacks? However, before discussing this detail, it is imperative to discuss the evolution of DDoS attacks to understand how they have gotten too sophisticated for the legacy tools.
The DDoS attacks have evolved since 1996, when the attackers used a spoofed IP to overwhelm the servers of a New York-based ISP. The next evolution arrived with the introduction of IoT devices. The questionable securing of these devices allowed the bad actors to expand the botnets, and consequently, the attack size, to rise to very high levels. The most terrifying demonstration of weaponizing IoT endpoints was in 2016 when a DDoS attack almost shut down the internet. The addition of new technologies like 5G to the IoT has just added gasoline to the fire because of its high speed and low latency. Now, let us see why modern bot management solutions offer a better alternative to traditional tools like firewalls and CAPTCHAs.
Bots: chameleons of the internet
DDoS attacks are generally seen as giant waves that overwhelm organizational IT resources. But as technology matures, not all attackers launch waves that are easy to spot. It now uses bots that look like legitimate users. Unfondly called as “application layer” attacks, these target specific apps by flooding them with millions of seemingly normal requests. And traditional tools may be of no help against such attacks.
To start, tools like firewalls can stop one threat at a time, which is ineffective against modern DDoS attacks, which can quickly overwhelm such defenses. Firewalls with anti-DDoS capabilities have a certain threshold. Once the threshold is reached, both good and bad users are shut out. Here is where bot management can step in.
A bot management solution allows users to block “bad” bots and only allow “good bots” to interact with their web-facing assets. This is of particular use for volumetric attacks, as it can detect anomalous bot behavior and stop them, reducing the load on the traditional tools. However, they are pretty much useless against the traditional means of DDoS attacks. The lesson here? Both systems are complementary. It makes more sense to deploy both to ensure effective protection from all types of DDoS attacks.
Why does it matter more in 2025?
At the cost of sounding cliché, technological improvements mean that bots are evolving too fast to be controlled by traditional security tools. They can mimic human behavior, can rotate through billions of IP addresses, and the scariest part? They can even solve captchas, which used to be THE technology to differentiate between humans and bots. In the modern virtual world, nothing is as it seems. Organizations need to implement modern-er tools equipped with AI/ML to detect things going wrong.
Another reason is the costs involved. The stakes get much higher when the attackers can extract data and put it up for sale for exploitation, and the costs incurred due to downed infrastructure. As data laws get even more stringent, such attacks can cost the companies a lot, both from the financial and reputational angle.
Not and/or, only and
Both bot management and traditional DDoS tools are needed as the attack techniques keep evolving. Think of it like home security: your DDoS protection is your big, visible fence and floodlights that keep obvious trouble away. Bot management is your smart security system inside the house — motion sensors, hidden cameras, and real-time alerts that pick up on suspicious activity that outsiders can’t see. When you combine these two layers, you get real resilience. The brute-force attackers get blocked at the gate, while the stealthier, more sophisticated threats get stopped before they can slip through the cracks.
Points to ponder:
- If you want to know your preparedness level for all types of DDoS attacks, just start with the following questions:
Do you know how much of your web traffic comes from bots? - Do you have visibility into whether those bots are helping (like search engine crawlers) or hurting (like account hijackers)?
- Does your current DDoS protection include defenses at the application layer, or just the network edge?
- Do your security tools share data with each other, or are they working in isolation?
The answers will be key for vendors as well in order to understand the needs of modern SOCs and implement them in their products accordingly.
Final word:
Cybersecurity remains a constant race between the blue and red teams. But the stakes are for real, instead of simulations. As techniques keep evolving and grow into multichannel and innovative threats, such as low and slow and slow loris attacks, depending on only one kind of security may not be a good idea. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Implementing bot protection+traditional DDoS tools may help you achieve victory without going into a war. To put it in purely technological language, QKS Group’s security analyst Lokesh Biswal, “While DDoS attacks themselves become increasingly sophisticated, bot-assisted application-layer attacks are also rising. The differentiation between DDoS protection and bot management will become even more blurry in the future. Today it is needed to integrate both of these functions in a combined, intelligent protection layer. These solutions utilize advances in AI/ML and dynamic behavioral analytics to detect and neutralize brute-force and insidious bot-assisted threats within one architecture. This merger will define tomorrow’s adaptive cyberspace protection.”