On Thursday 23 September 2021 at 01:03 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 162.6 Gbps and lasted 46 minutes. Traffic originated from 2521 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 162.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 46 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.693 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.08% |
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 23 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?