On Wednesday 23 August 2023 at 16:15 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 47.9 Gbps and lasted 89 minutes. Traffic originated from 437 autonomous systems in 65 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 47.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 89 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.729 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.47% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 101 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.