Why NETSCOUT Doubled its DDoS Mitigation Capacity to 33Tbps

NETSCOUT is making its infrastructure resilient against the high-capacity distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that plague the world today. 

As a big industry player providing observability, AIOps, cybersecurity and DDoS attack protection solutions, NETSCOUT has announced continued investments in its infrastructure and technology, with a specific aim. Doubling the DDoS mitigation capacity of Arbor Cloud to touch 33Tbps (terabits per second). 

“Not long ago, 1Tbps DDoS attacks made headlines,” recalls Simon Cartwright, Enterprise Sales Director at NETSCOUT on LinkedIn. ”Today, attacks approaching or exceeding 30Tbps are becoming a reality, fuelled by larger botnets and increasingly sophisticated attack techniques. 

“As the threat landscape evolves, organisations are rethinking what it takes to keep critical digital services available.”

The mission is to keep critical digital services online in light of increasing attacker sophistication. A recent Cloudflare report had uncovered a 31.4Tbps baseline for DDoS, making NETSCOUT’s infrastructure evolution, timely and important. 

DDosing and NETSCOUT's Arbor Cloud 

To overwhelm a website or a service, bad actors flood the gates with an impossible amount of random traffic, locking out legitimate users, in what is called a DDOS attack. 

The attacker may control thousands – or even millions in some cases – of compromised devices which are called botnets. 

All these devices then send requests targeting the victim’s website simultaneously and a website that once handled a couple thousand users has to deal with this flurry of fake requests in their billions. 

This is where NETSCOUT's Arbor Cloud comes in. Before this flash flood of traffic hits the client server, using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), it routes the traffic to Arbor’s cloud instead. 

This is where traffic is scrubbed – the data packers are analysed for legitimacy and only clean traffic reaches the customer’s server. 

Capacity boost in context 

NETSCOUT's expansion of Arbor Cloud DDoS mitigation capacity to 33Tbps comes as organisations face increasingly larger and more sophisticated cyber attacks. 

The figure refers to the amount of malicious internet traffic the platform can absorb and filter before it reaches a customer's infrastructure. At 33Tbps, the capacity exceeds the size of the largest publicly disclosed volumetric DDoS attacks, highlighting the scale required to defend modern digital services.

Ahead of opaque solutions, Arbor Cloud combines its expanded mitigation capacity with NETSCOUT's global threat intelligence and internet visibility.

Operating across 16 scrubbing centres worldwide, the platform analyses incoming traffic, blocks malicious requests and forwards legitimate traffic to customers, helping to keep websites, applications and critical services online during attacks. 

The increased capacity also enables organisations to withstand multiple simultaneous attacks known as carpet bombing attacks and increasingly common multi-vector campaigns without compromising performance.

Cloud-based protection to curtail chaos

According to Markets and Markets, demand for DDoS protection continues to grow as cloud adoption accelerates and attackers use AI to launch faster and much more complex campaigns. 

Mega botnets such as Aisuru and Kimwolf have also pushed attack volumes towards the 30Tbps mark, increasing pressure on enterprises and service providers to strengthen their defences.

NETSCOUT said Arbor Cloud forms part of its hybrid DDoS protection strategy, combining on-premises defence with cloud-based traffic scrubbing through automated cloud signalling. 

Supported by a 24/7 Security Operations Centre, the company expects the capacity expansion to be completed by the end of August 2026, reinforcing its focus on delivering resilient, large-scale DDoS protection as cyber threats continue to evolve.

“With the increased use of AI, threat actors are targeting organisations whose defences are vulnerable to the new, more complex DDoS attacks designed to take down critical infrastructure,” states Carlos Morales, SVP and General Manager of Arbor Cloud at NETSCOUT. 

“As enterprises increasingly rely on AI-powered applications and cloud-native services, while at the same time, attack size and complexity continue to rise, implementing automated and proactive defences for uninterrupted availability has become a business risk imperative. Arbor Cloud plays a key role in achieving that objective.”