Most DDoS tests fire traffic from a handful of cloud data centres. Many real attacks look very different: they come from thousands of ordinary devices around the world, such as home routers, cameras and phones. If your test cannot imitate that, it may tell you far less than you think.
Regulators now expect evidence. DORA asks financial entities to test their digital operational resilience, NIS2 raises the bar for critical infrastructure, and financial supervisors worldwide, FINMA among them, expect institutions to know how their systems behave under stress. So the real question is no longer whether to test. It is which test you can trust.
How the market tests today
Managed cloud simulation. Providers such as Red Button, RedWolf and NimbusDDoS generate controlled, multi vector attacks from cloud infrastructure, often with an expert in the room. They deliver volume and good process. The catch: the traffic comes from known cloud ranges, which can be far easier for a mitigation service to recognise than the residential and mobile traffic of a real botnet.
Continuous non disruptive probing. MazeBolt sends small crafted probes around the clock to spot configuration gaps without downtime. Excellent for drift detection, but it does not show how your defences hold up under real load.
Lab appliances. Keysight BreakingPoint offers enormous precision and thousands of attack signatures. It needs in house expertise and capital investment, and it typically runs inside your own environment rather than across the open internet.
Open source tools. Fine for a lab. Not evidence you can hand to an auditor.
What Obsidio does differently
Obsidio orchestrates real, ethically sourced devices distributed worldwide instead of a few cloud load generators. Criminal botnets are built from hijacked machines. Obsidio’s network is not. The result is traffic that looks like a genuine attack, because it comes from the same kind of devices a genuine attack would use.
Every test starts with ownership verification, typically a DNS TXT record, so nobody can point it at a system they do not control. Tests run inside Trusted Execution Environments with full audit logging, and you can abort instantly from live metrics. The final report is cryptographically signed and mapped to FINMA, DORA and NIS2, so an auditor can verify it independently.
One question for any vendor
Ask where the traffic comes from, and whether your mitigation provider would recognise it as a test. If the honest answer is yes, you are measuring how well your defences spot a drill, not how well they stop an attack.
Descriptions of other providers are based on their public materials, such as Red Button and RedWolf, and on independent comparisons such as CyberDB’s 2026 overview. Corrections are welcome.