On Wednesday 10 August 2022 at 04:08 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 335.0 Gbps and lasted 8 minutes. Traffic originated from 1522 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 335.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 8 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.567 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
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 39 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.