On Wednesday 10 March 2021 at 09:48 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a retail banking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 243.4 Gbps and lasted 52 minutes. Traffic originated from 3005 autonomous systems in 20 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 243.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 52 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.290 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.088% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.26% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 20 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 165 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.