On Tuesday 30 April 2024 at 10:14 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a video streaming customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 387.0 Gbps and lasted 141 minutes. Traffic originated from 3801 autonomous systems in 62 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 387.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 141 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.416 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.13% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 19 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.