On Sunday 30 August 2026 at 20:06 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a ticketing customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 156.1 Gbps and lasted 171 minutes. Traffic originated from 1406 autonomous systems in 96 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 156.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 171 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.722 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.079% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 44 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.