Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) have been a tremendously lucrative activity for bad actors – and therefore has become a major segment unto itself, with the ability to create havoc and significant cost not only for the attack victim (typically an enterprise or government agency) but also for the serving network.

This research note combines a look at two developments; the technological evolution of DDoS, and the corresponding and resulting evolution of the Nokia Deepfield Defender DDoS security solution, rooted in their Deepfield network analytics solution, and the Nokia FPx series of fully programmable router chips.