On Sunday 5 February 2023 at 11:32 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a municipal services customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 333.7 Gbps and lasted 66 minutes. Traffic originated from 2879 autonomous systems in 59 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 333.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 66 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.582 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.30% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 92 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.