Botnet Takedowns Shrink DDoS Fleets as Attack Intensity Reaches 2.3 Tbit/s

A March multinational operation involving the United States, Canada, and Germany disrupted infrastructure supporting the Aisiru and Kimwolf botnets, contributing to a fall in the largest observed botnet from 13.5 million devices in Q1 2026 to 2.09 million in Q2. Link11 also reported a 42% decline in DDoS attacks in Europe during the first half of 2026, partly attributing the reduction to law-enforcement actions including Operation Eastwood and the shutdown of four IoT botnets.

Attackers are compensating with more powerful and resilient campaigns: Link11 recorded peaks of 2.3 Tbit/s and 322 million packets per second, with 705 TB of cumulative malicious traffic, driven by super-botnets and hijacked cloud servers. Operators are increasingly dispersing traffic sources and adopting decentralized command infrastructure; the Aeternum and Void botnets use Polygon and Ethereum smart contracts for C2 distribution. DDoS surges are also being used to conceal SQL-injection and XSS probing, requiring defenses that combine continuous traffic inspection, behavioral detection, adaptive filtering, and application-layer monitoring.