On Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 09:37 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a news publisher customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 259.9 Gbps and lasted 96 minutes. Traffic originated from 4076 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 259.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 96 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.932 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.031% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.43% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 25 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Clear and practical, thanks.
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.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.