Multi-vector DDoS attacks have become the norm, not the exception. Our 2025 threat report found that 63% of attacks now use three or more attack vectors simultaneously. The strategy is simple: different vectors stress different parts of your infrastructure. If you can only mitigate one, the others succeed.
A Typical Multi-Vector Attack
- Phase 1 (0:00–0:05): UDP flood at 400Gbps to saturate the upstream link.
- Phase 2 (0:03–0:20): SYN flood targeting the origin server's connection table.
- Phase 3 (0:10–ongoing): HTTP flood against the login endpoint to exhaust backend capacity.
- Adaptive phase: if the UDP flood is mitigated, the L7 attack intensifies.
Why Single-Solution Mitigation Fails
A firewall handles the SYN flood but passes the UDP flood straight through. A CDN absorbs the HTTP flood on cached pages but the API is still exposed. An on-premise scrubber drops the volumetric traffic but leaves the L7 attack untouched. Each tool has a blind spot. Attackers know this and deliberately target the gaps.
Full-Stack Mitigation
Effective protection against multi-vector attacks requires a unified scrubbing layer that handles L3 through L7 with a single traffic flow. Akarguard's reverse proxy applies volumetric scrubbing, protocol filtering, and behavioral L7 analysis in a single pipeline — meaning all vectors are mitigated simultaneously without requiring separate tools.
Our recommendation
Assume every serious attack will be multi-vector. Test your mitigation against L3, L4, and L7 simultaneously. Gaps exposed in testing are gaps attackers will exploit in production.