Experts assessed the threat of DDoS attacks for telecom operators

DDoS attacks pose a serious threat to telecommunications operators, especially backbone operators that provide communications for millions of users and organizations, Evgeny Pudovkin, technical director of IT integrator Telecom Exchange, told Izvestia on January 24.

"The peculiarity of such attacks is that they can cause large-scale disruptions, affecting not only the operator, but also its customers, including banks, retailers and Internet providers. One of the most sophisticated types of attacks are carpet attacks," he said.

According to him, a carpet attack implies simultaneous load on many IP-addresses of the network. This type of attack is difficult to detect because traditional monitoring systems often analyze only the load on individual IPs, not the entire network. The attack may go undetected until its impact begins to cause degradation of services.

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"Politically motivated hackers often combine carpet attacks with other types of multi-vector attacks, including SYN flooding, UDP flooding, and HTTP request flooding. This complicates their filtering and requires the use of adaptive defense systems," said the expert.

In turn, Servicepipe product director Mikhail Khlebunov added that since the beginning of 2025, telecom operators and ISPs have been constantly targeted by hacktivists. Carpet attacks on telecoms were also recorded in 2024.

"For politically motivated hackers, telecom is an ideal target. Primarily because an attack on a single player can lead to unavailability of its customers' services. Also, one successful attack on a major telecom operator can lead to service unavailability for smaller players using its network. As a result, people and companies that have nothing to do with the attacked organization will not be able to connect to the Internet," the expert explained.

Khlebunov said that to protect against DDoS attacks in telecom it is necessary to build an echeloned defense, choosing solutions that are able to identify carpet attacks and resist them.

Earlier, on January 13, it was reported that 65% of analyzed companies in Russia have a low level of security. Attacks on them can cause critical damage, lead to the suspension of key business processes and financial losses. This is stated in the results of a study by the information security company Bastion.