On Tuesday 17 February 2026 at 12:58 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a video streaming customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 232.8 Gbps and lasted 100 minutes. Traffic originated from 3856 autonomous systems in 44 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 232.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 100 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.047 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.33% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 108 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.