Defending consumer web properties against modern DDoS attacks

Read how to protect consumer websites and defend against modern DDoS attacks with layered security, resilient architecture, and graceful service degradation. The post Defending consumer web properties against modern DDoS attacks appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog .

If you own, create, or maintain online services and web portals, you’re probably aware of the dramatic upswing in DDoS attacks on your domains. AI has democratized tooling not just for us but for threat actors as well. DDoS in this era has extended from simple bandwidth saturation to sophisticated, application-layer abuse. Defending against this activity now requires system-level design, beyond just the typical network-level filtering.

As botnets continue to expand their footprint and evade identification, it is important for us to take a step back, assess the situation, and take a defense-in-depth approach to increase our resilience against this class of disruption. Protect your cloud workloads with Azure Cloud Security DDoS activity across Bing and other online services at Microsoft has seen a large uptick in the past five to six years. As reported in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 , Microsoft now processes more than 100 trillion security signals , blocks approximately 4.

5 million new malware attempts , analyzes 38 million identity risk detections , and screens 5 billion emails for malicious content each day. This helps illustrate both the breadth of modern attack surfaces and the automation cyberattackers can now wield at industrial scale. When we narrow in specifically on DDoS, an even clearer trend emerges: beginning in mid-March of 2024 , Microsoft observed a rise in network DDoS attacks that eventually reached approximately 4,500 cyberattacks per day by June 2024. And this persistent volume was paired with a shift toward more stealthy application-layer techniques.

In my role as Vice President, Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud Platform at Microsoft, I focus on helping the Microsoft AI and Bing teams build systems that are safe, resilient, and worthy of user trust, even under the sustained pressure we’re receiving from today’s cyberattackers. Whether you are responsible for a single public website or a large portfolio of consumer-facing applications, defending against modern DDoS attacks means more than just absorbing traffic. It means building defense-in-depth robust enough that, even if some attack traffic gets through, your service stays usable for the people who rely on it.

The nature of modern DDoS attacks Early DDoS attacks were largely about volume. Cyberattackers would flood a target with traffic in an attempt to saturate network capacity and force an outage. While volumetric attacks still happen, most large services now have baseline protections that make this approach less effective on its own. Get always-on monitoring with Azure DDoS Protection Modern DDoS attacks are more nuanced. They are often multi-vector, with a single campaign potentially including network-layer floods and application-layer abuse at the same time.

Along with the exponential increase in the scale of these cyberattacks, they are also getting more tailored to stress specific applications and user flows.