On Friday 15 September 2023 at 07:08 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 360.1 Gbps and lasted 106 minutes. Traffic originated from 512 autonomous systems in 14 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 360.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 106 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.767 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
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 19 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.