On Sunday 23 July 2023 at 20:37 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 267.4 Gbps and lasted 145 minutes. Traffic originated from 3460 autonomous systems in 39 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 267.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 145 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.747 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.034% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 33 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.