On Friday 7 January 2022 at 05:54 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a fashion retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 129.3 Gbps and lasted 5 minutes. Traffic originated from 171 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 129.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 5 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.157 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.037% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.61% |
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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 39 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.