On Tuesday 17 June 2025 at 20:35 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a airline booking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 195.2 Gbps and lasted 161 minutes. Traffic originated from 1251 autonomous systems in 94 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 195.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 161 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.926 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.047% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
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 21 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.