DDoS Stress Testing

DDoS stress testing is an authorized, controlled simulation of a distributed denial-of-service attack against your own infrastructure. Engineers generate realistic Layer 4 (volumetric, SYN/UDP flood) and Layer 7 (HTTP flood, slow-loris, application-logic abuse) traffic to measure whether your CDN, WAF, and origin actually absorb it — then report measured mitigation against what your stack was expected to do. It is the only way to prove your DDoS defenses hold before a real attacker tests them for you.

Yes — when it's authorized. We fire test traffic only after a signed authorization agreement defining scope, targets, and timing, and we coordinate advance notice with your hosting provider and ISP, most of whom contractually require it for synthetic load. Unauthorized DDoS traffic, by contrast, is a criminal offense across the EU and most jurisdictions — the signed scope is what separates a stress test from an attack.

Only if your mitigation is missing — which is the point. We start small and ramp up; we abort the moment your stack folds, so the impact window is minimized.

Yes — and we will help coordinate with them. Most providers require advance authorization for synthetic load testing.

We've delivered tests up to sustained multi-Tbps. For larger or unusual scopes, ask on the discovery call.

Twice a year at minimum, and after any change to your edge stack — new CDN, new WAF ruleset, new origin architecture. Mitigation configs drift silently; a stress test is the only way to catch a gap before an attacker does.

Load testing measures capacity under legitimate traffic — how many real users you can serve before latency climbs. DDoS stress testing measures resilience under hostile traffic — whether malicious L4/L7 patterns designed to exhaust resources can knock you over. Passing a load test tells you nothing about surviving an attack; the traffic shapes and failure modes are different.

A penetration test looks for exploitable weaknesses in your applications and infrastructure. A DDoS stress test measures a different failure mode entirely — whether your stack stays up under volume. Many clients run both: see our penetration testing service for the exploit-focused half.