On Wednesday 17 September 2025 at 12:30 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 131.5 Gbps and lasted 7 minutes. Traffic originated from 2531 autonomous systems in 22 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 131.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 7 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.935 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
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 34 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.