On Wednesday 30 March 2022 at 20:49 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 258.2 Gbps and lasted 71 minutes. Traffic originated from 1517 autonomous systems in 94 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 258.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 71 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.670 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 19 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.