On Monday 23 January 2023 at 00:38 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a gaming community customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 214.7 Gbps and lasted 67 minutes. Traffic originated from 2190 autonomous systems in 104 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 214.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 67 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.740 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.033% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
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 12 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.