On Saturday 28 January 2023 at 17:01 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a sports betting customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 298.1 Gbps and lasted 132 minutes. Traffic originated from 1701 autonomous systems in 114 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 298.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 132 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.561 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.07% |
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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 195 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.