On Wednesday 16 June 2021 at 04:00 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a online payments customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 52.9 Gbps and lasted 166 minutes. Traffic originated from 3590 autonomous systems in 105 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 52.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 166 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.664 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. 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
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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.