On Sunday 20 February 2022 at 03:23 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a fashion retail customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 316.8 Gbps and lasted 35 minutes. Traffic originated from 2766 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 316.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 35 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.443 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| 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 37 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.