On Monday 6 March 2023 at 16:05 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a healthcare portal customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 223.8 Gbps and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 2187 autonomous systems in 26 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 223.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 133 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.531 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.082% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.30% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.