On Tuesday 24 August 2021 at 23:55 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a tax authority portal customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 150.2 Gbps and lasted 85 minutes. Traffic originated from 728 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 150.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 85 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.515 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.041% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 163 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.