On Tuesday 4 July 2023 at 06:12 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 318.3 Gbps and lasted 104 minutes. Traffic originated from 2919 autonomous systems in 94 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 318.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 104 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.867 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
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 34 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.