On Thursday 5 February 2026 at 09:32 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 319.9 Gbps and lasted 114 minutes. Traffic originated from 958 autonomous systems in 96 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 319.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 114 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.719 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.008% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.42% |
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 16 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.