On Sunday 30 January 2022 at 21:14 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a electronics retail customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 278.7 Gbps and lasted 185 minutes. Traffic originated from 3096 autonomous systems in 52 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 278.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 185 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.735 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.012% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
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 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 158 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?