On Tuesday 17 September 2024 at 17:48 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a developer platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 122.2 Gbps and lasted 116 minutes. Traffic originated from 1315 autonomous systems in 20 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 122.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 116 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.215 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.081% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.75% |
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 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Clear and practical, thanks.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?