On Wednesday 20 October 2021 at 09:49 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a sports betting customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 179.9 Gbps and lasted 173 minutes. Traffic originated from 3117 autonomous systems in 103 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 179.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 173 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.301 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.13% |
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 16 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.