Nokia today announced the launch of Nokia Deepfield Genome Shield, the industry’s first security automation system that facilitates proactive, always-on DDoS protection for telecommunications providers, hosting companies, internet exchange points, and cloud builders in the AI era. Genome Shield addresses the fundamental shift in DDoS threats driven by the emergence of residential proxy botnets, which now comprise approximately 200 million compromised devices worldwide.
The DDoS threat landscape has shifted over the past 12 months. Attacks now come from real subscriber devices, deliver multi‑terabit bursts that last seconds to minutes, and rapidly rotate IPs across thousands of nodes. Residential proxy botnets — estimated at 250–600 Tbps — are used to dynamically leverage large numbers of residential users, unaware that their connections are used to generate evasive attacks impacting many national networks.
Traditional scrubber-based diversion and reactive mitigation can’t respond quickly enough to these sub‑minute attacks. Automated, AI-driven DDoS has industrialized the residential proxy supply chain used by botnets like Kimwolf, while AI-assisted code generation is accelerating the evolution of evasion techniques.