On Friday 28 July 2023 at 14:38 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 25.3 Gbps and lasted 42 minutes. Traffic originated from 3251 autonomous systems in 82 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 25.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 42 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.412 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.081% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.39% |
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 25 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 116 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?