On Saturday 4 July 2026 at 11:03 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a municipal services customer in North America. The attack peaked at 141.6 Gbps and lasted 75 minutes. Traffic originated from 1993 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 141.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 75 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.180 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.61% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?