On Saturday 16 August 2025 at 22:17 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a education platform customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 294.4 Gbps and lasted 148 minutes. Traffic originated from 1913 autonomous systems in 70 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 294.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 148 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.443 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
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 21 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.