On Saturday 30 April 2022 at 15:00 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 29.6 Gbps and lasted 149 minutes. Traffic originated from 1802 autonomous systems in 26 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 29.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 149 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.803 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.15% |
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 39 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.