On Wednesday 29 January 2025 at 01:36 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a news publisher customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 364.3 Gbps and lasted 52 minutes. Traffic originated from 2287 autonomous systems in 43 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 364.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 52 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.688 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.019% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.