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DDoS Attack Volume Calculator

Work out ddos attack volume instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About DDoS Attack Volume Calculator

Reflection and amplification attacks let a small botnet generate enormous volumes: the attacker sends spoofed requests to open services that reply with far larger responses. Amplification factors range from about 3 for DNS to over 50,000 for memcached, so ten gigabits of attacker bandwidth can become terabits at the victim. Packet rate matters separately, because many devices fail on packets per second long before bandwidth saturates.

Formula

Amplified volume

attack Gbps = sources x per-source Kbps x amplification / 1e6; pps = attack bits per second / (packet bytes x 8)

Worked example

With the default values below, DDoS Attack Volume Calculator returns Attack volume of 500.00. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Attacking sourcesminimum 1
25,000
Bandwidth per sourceminimum 1 Kbps
400 Kbps
Amplification factoraccepts 1–5,000 x
50 x
Average packet sizeaccepts 64–9,000 bytes
1,200 bytes

Results

Attack volume
500.00 Gbps
Packet rate
52,083,333 pps
Attacker-side bandwidth consumed
10.000 Gbps
Scale assessment
Very large - requires cloud scrubbing

Step by step

  1. 1Values used
  2. 2Amplified volume
  3. 3Attack volume= 500.00 Gbps
  4. 4Packet rate= 52,083,333 pps
  5. 5Attacker-side bandwidth consumed= 10.000 Gbps
  6. 6Scale assessment= Very large - requires cloud scrubbing

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 3 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does packet rate matter as much as bandwidth?

Firewalls, load balancers and routers have a packets-per-second ceiling set by their forwarding engine. A flood of small packets can exhaust it at a fraction of the link capacity.

How is amplification prevented?

By source-address validation (BCP 38) at network edges and by not exposing UDP services such as open DNS resolvers, NTP monlist, memcached and CLDAP to the internet.

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