On Thursday 17 March 2022 at 14:58 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a sports betting customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 337.9 Gbps and lasted 153 minutes. Traffic originated from 781 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 337.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 153 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.041 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.033% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
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 37 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 37 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.