On Saturday 21 May 2022 at 05:22 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a airline booking customer in North America. The attack peaked at 101.8 Gbps and lasted 155 minutes. Traffic originated from 426 autonomous systems in 55 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 101.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 155 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.351 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 24 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?