On Saturday 3 September 2022 at 06:31 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a municipal services customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 123.6 Gbps and lasted 159 minutes. Traffic originated from 1535 autonomous systems in 86 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 123.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 159 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.189 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.044% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
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 34 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.