DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)

A Distributed Denial of Service attack uses many compromised hosts (a botnet) or amplification techniques to overwhelm a target with traffic, exhausting bandwidth or compute and rendering services unavailable. Telecom-specific DDoS targets include SIP servers, DNS resolvers, signalling endpoints, and increasingly 5G control-plane interfaces. Defence relies on upstream scrubbing, anycast, rate limiting, and protocol-aware filtering.

Categories: SignalingThreats and AttacksProtocols and Standards

DDoS in context

Signaling protocols carry the control-plane messages that set up calls, register subscribers and route SMS. SS7, Diameter, GTP-C and SIP are the four dominant families, and interconnect exposure of any of them is treated by GSMA as top-tier telecom risk.

Telecom threats range from opportunistic SMS phishing and SIM swap to nation-state grade location tracking. The common thread is that most attacks exploit the inherited trust model of legacy signaling protocols.

To place DDoS in the wider telecom-security picture, review Attack Surface Mapping, Denial of Service (DoS), Anomaly Detection, BGP, CAMARA Project and Charging System — each entry cross-references back to this page so you can walk the topic in either direction.

Related terms

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