On Friday 12 December 2025 at 22:29 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a fashion retail customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 224.7 Gbps and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 1830 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 224.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 133 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.531 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.56% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.