On Sunday 10 July 2022 at 00:05 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a education platform customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 137.8 Gbps and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 1874 autonomous systems in 89 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 137.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.330 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.059% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 29 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.