On Sunday 24 September 2023 at 02:45 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 39.5 Gbps and lasted 29 minutes. Traffic originated from 1368 autonomous systems in 32 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 39.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 29 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.657 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.045% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.24% |
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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?