On Saturday 8 January 2022 at 15:57 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a online casino customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 111.9 Gbps and lasted 134 minutes. Traffic originated from 459 autonomous systems in 115 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 111.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 134 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.590 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.79% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.