On Wednesday 4 May 2022 at 12:56 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a fashion retail customer in North America. The attack peaked at 165.5 Gbps and lasted 187 minutes. Traffic originated from 536 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 165.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 187 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.539 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.080% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 33 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.