DDoS Scrubbing

DDoS scrubbing is the practice of diverting traffic through filtering systems that separate legitimate requests from attack traffic, forwarding only clean traffic to the target. Scrubbing happens either at the network edge (always-on) or on demand when an attack is detected.

Attacks are categorized in layers: volumetric attacks saturate bandwidth, protocol attacks exhaust connection tables, and application-layer attacks mimic real users to exhaust backend resources. Effective protection combines all three defenses — large scrubbing capacity for the first, deep protocol inspection for the second, and behavioral analysis for the third.

When comparing providers, ask three questions: is protection always on or does detection lag cost you minutes, what is the scrubbing capacity in terabits, and does the price include application-layer defense or is that an add-on tier. The answers vary more than any other network feature.