On Tuesday 9 July 2024 at 01:53 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a healthcare portal customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 348.3 Gbps and lasted 138 minutes. Traffic originated from 1056 autonomous systems in 82 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 348.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 138 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.850 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 33 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.