On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 15:12 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 359.7 Gbps and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 3772 autonomous systems in 108 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 359.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 133 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.119 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 27 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?