On Saturday 20 March 2021 at 12:43 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a retail banking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 177.7 Gbps and lasted 59 minutes. Traffic originated from 69 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 177.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 59 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.069 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.042% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.25% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 28 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.