On Monday 18 April 2022 at 09:41 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 22.9 Gbps and lasted 33 minutes. Traffic originated from 3889 autonomous systems in 97 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 22.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 33 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.838 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.42% |
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 40 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.