On Sunday 25 August 2024 at 04:11 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 108.1 Gbps and lasted 120 minutes. Traffic originated from 2622 autonomous systems in 83 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 108.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 120 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.577 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.042% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
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 19 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
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.