On Saturday 3 December 2022 at 00:47 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a crypto exchange customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 111.6 Gbps and lasted 61 minutes. Traffic originated from 248 autonomous systems in 78 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 111.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 61 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.839 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.052% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.