On Tuesday 26 November 2024 at 07:19 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 46.9 Gbps and lasted 100 minutes. Traffic originated from 1623 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 46.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 100 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.625 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.061% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.61% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 35 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.