On Tuesday 26 August 2025 at 10:25 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a developer platform customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 168.9 Gbps and lasted 190 minutes. Traffic originated from 3147 autonomous systems in 26 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 168.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 190 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.462 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.035% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 37 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 156 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
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.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.