Threat Bulletin 1276: carpet-bombing UDP flood against a news publisher platform in the UK

On Monday 12 January 2026 at 18:09 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a news publisher customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 133.3 Gbps and lasted 105 minutes. Traffic originated from 1960 autonomous systems in 9 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.

Vector carpet-bombing UDP flood
Peak 133.3 Gbps
Duration 105 min
Time to mitigation 0.824 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.069%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.29%

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 20 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
  • Enable authenticated origin pulls.
  • Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.

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