On Sunday 20 March 2022 at 12:46 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a gaming community customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 264.6 Gbps and lasted 49 minutes. Traffic originated from 1766 autonomous systems in 60 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 264.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 49 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.908 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 35 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.