On Friday 29 November 2024 at 10:13 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a developer platform customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 174.9 Gbps and lasted 10 minutes. Traffic originated from 2789 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 174.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 10 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.389 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.001% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
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 32 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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.