On Monday 9 October 2023 at 10:32 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a sports betting customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 240.3 Gbps and lasted 41 minutes. Traffic originated from 2229 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 240.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 41 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.099 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.090% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.62% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 29 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.