On Friday 28 January 2022 at 06:08 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 235.1 Gbps and lasted 80 minutes. Traffic originated from 3073 autonomous systems in 15 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 235.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 80 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.836 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.087% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 25 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 183 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.