On Friday 13 June 2025 at 14:56 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a news publisher customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 151.2 Gbps and lasted 158 minutes. Traffic originated from 1037 autonomous systems in 81 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 151.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 158 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.804 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.033% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 35 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.