Nokia unveiled Deepfield Genome Shield, a security automation system designed to provide proactive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection for telecom providers, internet exchange points, and cloud builders.

A report from the Finnish firm published earlier this week suggests DDoS attacks are being supercharged by AI scraping, with such masses of data effectively fueling some of the world’s largest compromised device footprints.

Genome Shield is an attempt to address this growing AI-driven threat by extending capabilities from Nokia's Deepfield Defender offering to provide network-wide automated enforcement. It aggregates threat intelligence from multiple sources, with that information used to support automated DDoS policies and protections.

Jeff Smith, VP and GM of Nokia’s Deepfield suite, outlined that Genome Shield combines intelligence sources from more than five billion internet endpoints, while Deepfield Defender automates policy compilation and enforcement across the entire network.

“The past year has fundamentally changed DDoS security. Residential proxy botnets have invalidated 25 years of assumptions about how attacks work and how to defend against them,” Smith opined. “The hard problem today is maintaining dynamic, massive IP threat feeds and enforcing protection against them in real time, at network scale, continuously and automatically. Genome Shield is the industry's answer to that challenge.”

According to Nokia's DDoS threat report, the simultaneous mobilization of compromised devices across major U.S. carriers could generate threat actor firepower exceeding hundreds of terabits per second. Such an onslaught has the potential to disable internet connectivity for entire nations by disrupting large-scale network infrastructure.

Genome Shield was created following engagement with customers to give them the means to prevent such a disaster, shifting protection from reactive mitigation to proactive enforcement across existing network infrastructure.

Among the offering’s capabilities are means to block command-and-control communications, preventing potential attacks from being launched, and so-called "DDoS policers," which suppress amplification and volumetric traffic through proactive rate limiting.

Initial Genome Shield capabilities have already been introduced within Nokia Deepfield Defender, with Nokia confirming additional features are set to be rolled out later this year.

One customer already making use of the offering is RedDot Tech, which provides technology solutions to telecom providers in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Protecting our infrastructure from inbound DDoS attacks while managing compromised subscriber devices requires carrier-grade automation,” Charlie Attoum, Reddot’s network infrastructure director, said. “By implementing Nokia Deepfield Genome Shield, we have transitioned from reactive, manual workflows to a proactive, unified security platform.”