On Thursday 27 October 2022 at 12:16 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a airline booking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 82.5 Gbps and lasted 177 minutes. Traffic originated from 1005 autonomous systems in 45 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 82.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 177 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.604 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 136 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.