On Monday 14 February 2022 at 08:58 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a video streaming customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 62.9 Gbps and lasted 186 minutes. Traffic originated from 1905 autonomous systems in 44 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 62.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 186 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.397 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.053% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.16% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 36 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 84 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?