On Thursday 3 November 2022 at 10:34 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a gaming community customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 175.4 Gbps and lasted 189 minutes. Traffic originated from 3123 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 175.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 189 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.396 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.079% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
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 22 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.