Multi-vector DDoS attacks have become common rather than exceptional. The strategy is simple: different vectors stress different parts of your infrastructure, so combining them means that if you can only mitigate one, the others still succeed. A serious attacker rarely relies on a single technique.
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
Multi-vector attacks need defence at more than one layer: raw volumetric and protocol floods stopped upstream at the network, and application-layer attacks filtered at a reverse proxy. Akarguard covers the L7 side — behavioural analysis, challenges, WAF and rate limits — and hides your origin so the network-layer vectors have no direct target. The volumetric packets themselves are handled by your host or transit provider, not by us.
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.