On Saturday 18 January 2025 at 00:41 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a municipal services customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 213.0 Gbps and lasted 9 minutes. Traffic originated from 2007 autonomous systems in 33 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 213.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 9 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.588 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.002% |
| 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 37 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.