On Tuesday 20 July 2021 at 01:00 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a video streaming customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 79.9 Gbps and lasted 114 minutes. Traffic originated from 359 autonomous systems in 38 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 79.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 114 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.206 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.080% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 17 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.