On Wednesday 16 April 2025 at 23:43 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a online payments customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 167.7 Gbps and lasted 147 minutes. Traffic originated from 1444 autonomous systems in 65 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 167.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 147 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.172 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.076% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
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 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.