On Tuesday 23 May 2023 at 17:44 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a education platform customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 205.3 Gbps and lasted 47 minutes. Traffic originated from 1483 autonomous systems in 45 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 205.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 47 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.089 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.22% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 13 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.