On Thursday 15 June 2023 at 05:35 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 303.3 Gbps and lasted 182 minutes. Traffic originated from 1629 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 303.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 182 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.533 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.083% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
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 22 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.