On Wednesday 9 March 2022 at 00:37 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 28.9 Gbps and lasted 115 minutes. Traffic originated from 3206 autonomous systems in 103 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 28.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 115 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.309 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.002% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 12 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 102 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.