On Friday 30 July 2021 at 16:51 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a developer platform customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 40.4 Gbps and lasted 40 minutes. Traffic originated from 3090 autonomous systems in 93 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 40.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 40 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.045 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.074% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 18 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.