On Tuesday 3 May 2022 at 05:56 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 66.6 Gbps and lasted 71 minutes. Traffic originated from 4173 autonomous systems in 9 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 66.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 71 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.265 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.075% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.16% |
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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
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?