On Tuesday 10 October 2023 at 18:32 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 361.7 Gbps and lasted 67 minutes. Traffic originated from 1502 autonomous systems in 68 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 361.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 67 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.470 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.087% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.62% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 26 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
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