On Wednesday 14 May 2025 at 14:04 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a sports betting customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 285.2 Gbps and lasted 11 minutes. Traffic originated from 1136 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 285.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 11 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.618 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
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 39 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?