On Saturday 29 October 2022 at 20:31 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a sports betting customer in North America. The attack peaked at 154.3 Gbps and lasted 54 minutes. Traffic originated from 2323 autonomous systems in 44 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 154.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 54 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.847 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.063% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.