On Saturday 16 April 2022 at 19:52 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in North America. The attack peaked at 84.3 Gbps and lasted 56 minutes. Traffic originated from 2763 autonomous systems in 14 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 84.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 56 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.460 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.009% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 221 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.