On Wednesday 31 August 2022 at 06:35 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a online casino customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 37.5 Gbps and lasted 19 minutes. Traffic originated from 2577 autonomous systems in 26 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 37.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 19 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.703 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.12% |
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 33 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.