What Is a Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) Attack?

You’ve likely heard about Denial of Service attacks. But this variant can cripple infrastructure and cost lives. Here’s what you need to know.

Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks have one aim: to overwhelm a service with so much traffic that the system buckles under the strain. This type of cyberattack is especially concerning because it is isolating and puts victims’ lives at risk.

In coordinated attacks, TDoS can cripple public infrastructure and render people unable to call emergency response services or notify their banks of suspicious activities on their accounts. Your phone company is responsible for having a system that’s resilient to TDoS attacks. Still, there are some things you can do in a TDoS attack.

TDoS are attacks where hackers use automated setups to flood a phone service with a high amount of false traffic, thus preventing legitimate calls from going through. To put it into perspective, you can think of this type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack as using an army of toy cars to occupy a highway and causing traffic congestion that prevents real cars from going through that road…