On Saturday 15 March 2025 at 15:25 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 336.7 Gbps and lasted 73 minutes. Traffic originated from 2443 autonomous systems in 18 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 336.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 73 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.191 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.076% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 20 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 226 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.