On Friday 17 February 2023 at 23:01 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a video streaming customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 22.2 Gbps and lasted 43 minutes. Traffic originated from 896 autonomous systems in 88 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 22.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 43 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.268 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.053% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.53% |
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 40 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 88 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?