On Sunday 27 March 2022 at 00:51 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 256.1 Gbps and lasted 153 minutes. Traffic originated from 1128 autonomous systems in 79 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 256.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 153 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.133 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.12% |
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 26 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.