On Wednesday 18 January 2023 at 17:57 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 199.6 Gbps and lasted 189 minutes. Traffic originated from 2337 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 199.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 189 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.622 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.010% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.44% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 12 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.