On Monday 27 February 2023 at 04:12 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a news publisher customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 287.0 Gbps and lasted 148 minutes. Traffic originated from 3808 autonomous systems in 30 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 287.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 148 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.408 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.067% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
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 30 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.