In recent years, cybersecurity experts have noted a significant increase in the use of VPS infrastructure as a tool for conducting large-scale DDoS attacks. Whereas previously attackers mainly relied on botnets consisting of infected IoT devices and vulnerable servers, today there is a growing trend towards exploiting rented virtual servers, which offer much higher levels of performance and bandwidth. The availability of VPS services on the market, their low cost, and the possibility of rapid scalability make them an attractive weapon for cybercriminals.
Unlike infected smart cameras, routers, or household appliances, which have limited resources and often unstable connections, a rented VPS is located in a data center with high internet speeds and stable infrastructure. This allows attackers to generate traffic that is an order of magnitude more intense than in classic botnets. Moreover, the ability to launch dozens or hundreds of virtual machines in a short period of time provides flexibility in conducting attacks and complicates the work of protection systems.
A particularly serious problem is the fact that many VPS providers do not implement sufficiently strict customer verification mechanisms, which opens the door to attackers using fake data or anonymous payment methods. Some services actually allow users to obtain a virtual server within minutes without thorough verification, and once abuse is detected, attackers simply switch to another provider. This mobility makes detecting and stopping attacks extremely difficult.
There has also been a change in the nature of DDoS attacks themselves: whereas previously most of them were based on simple high-volume traffic that overloaded the victim’s channels, now more complex and combined scenarios are increasingly being used. VPS resources allow attackers to perform not only UDP floods, but also application-level attacks, such as imitating legitimate HTTP requests or avalanche-like API calls. This makes traditional defense methods less effective, as the attacks may outwardly resemble normal traffic.
Cybercriminal groups often rent entire clusters of VPS nodes in different geographical locations, which allows them to mask attacks as distributed legitimate traffic. In some cases, such attacks have reached hundreds of gigabits per second, knocking even large Internet resources offline. An additional threat is the ability to rent VPS with GPU support or high computing power, which allows not only DDoS attacks, but also parallel operations, such as password cracking or crypto mining.
The growing trend of using VPS as a source of attacks is causing concern among experts, as this factor significantly increases the complexity of combating DDoS. Providers are forced to invest in monitoring systems, traffic filtering, and anomaly analysis, but the effectiveness of these measures directly depends on cooperation between companies and national response centers. At the same time, there are growing calls for stricter customer identification procedures when renting VPS, which could reduce the likelihood of anonymous use of servers for attacks.
Thus, the transition of attackers from mass botnets made up of IoT devices to a more organized use of VPS infrastructure marks a new stage in the evolution of DDoS threats. This increases the power and sophistication of attacks, makes them more difficult to block, and creates additional challenges for digital service owners, who now need to implement more intelligent and proactive protection systems. In the coming years, we can expect this type of attack to only intensify, with the VPS market remaining one of the key sources of cybersecurity risk.