On Monday 15 April 2024 at 01:56 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a healthcare portal customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 40.8 Gbps and lasted 162 minutes. Traffic originated from 1457 autonomous systems in 21 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 40.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 162 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.219 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.53% |
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 33 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.