On Friday 25 February 2022 at 18:20 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 250.0 Gbps and lasted 48 minutes. Traffic originated from 364 autonomous systems in 53 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 250.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 48 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.701 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.68% |
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 30 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.