On Friday 5 January 2024 at 15:47 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a online payments customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 176.6 Gbps and lasted 142 minutes. Traffic originated from 1468 autonomous systems in 9 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 176.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 142 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.542 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.29% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 37 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Clear and practical, thanks.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.