How botnet-driven DDoS attacks evolved in 2H 2025

In the second half of 2025, DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service, where attackers flood a target with traffic to shut it down) became more powerful and easier to launch due to three major changes: IoT botnets (networks of hacked internet-connected devices like routers) reached attack capacities of 30 terabits per second, AI and dark-web LLMs (large language models, AI systems trained on text data) made sophisticated attacks accessible to less-skilled attackers through simple conversational prompts, and DDoS-for-hire services became more widely available. Critical infrastructure like DNS servers (systems that translate website names into IP addresses) and government and finance sectors faced sustained pressure from groups coordinating attacks across multiple countries.