On Tuesday 6 August 2024 at 08:03 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 279.6 Gbps and lasted 27 minutes. Traffic originated from 2059 autonomous systems in 16 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 279.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 27 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.844 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.008% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 40 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 151 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.