On Sunday 25 April 2021 at 17:03 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a video streaming customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 150.7 Gbps and lasted 29 minutes. Traffic originated from 2921 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 150.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 29 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.081 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.087% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
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 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.