On Wednesday 6 March 2024 at 21:28 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 91.4 Gbps and lasted 72 minutes. Traffic originated from 2887 autonomous systems in 7 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 91.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 72 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.419 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.002% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.