On Monday 19 January 2026 at 16:56 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a gaming community customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 347.4 Gbps and lasted 130 minutes. Traffic originated from 455 autonomous systems in 19 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 347.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 130 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.138 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.032% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
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 35 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.