On Tuesday 31 May 2022 at 04:43 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a online payments customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 286.1 Gbps and lasted 67 minutes. Traffic originated from 3763 autonomous systems in 88 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 286.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 67 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.743 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.049% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
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 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.