On Sunday 27 July 2025 at 03:22 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a gaming community customer in North America. The attack peaked at 149.2 Gbps and lasted 32 minutes. Traffic originated from 3952 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 149.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 32 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.190 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.38% |
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 25 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
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.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?