On Sunday 13 June 2021 at 18:52 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a video streaming customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 159.6 Gbps and lasted 60 minutes. Traffic originated from 2326 autonomous systems in 49 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 159.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 60 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.859 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.075% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.78% |
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 33 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.