On Saturday 29 January 2022 at 09:03 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a video streaming customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 214.8 Gbps and lasted 104 minutes. Traffic originated from 2607 autonomous systems in 56 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 214.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 104 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.317 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.069% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
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 40 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Clear and practical, thanks.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.