On Sunday 23 March 2025 at 16:28 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a developer platform customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 264.8 Gbps and lasted 74 minutes. Traffic originated from 3707 autonomous systems in 96 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 264.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 74 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.525 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.026% |
| 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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?