On Saturday 8 May 2021 at 18:38 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a sports betting customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 21.0 Gbps and lasted 189 minutes. Traffic originated from 1262 autonomous systems in 38 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 21.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 189 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.242 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.