On Thursday 1 December 2022 at 07:51 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a ticketing customer in North America. The attack peaked at 184.8 Gbps and lasted 11 minutes. Traffic originated from 569 autonomous systems in 48 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 184.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 11 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.870 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.022% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.56% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.