On Tuesday 14 February 2023 at 22:06 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a video streaming customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 181.5 Gbps and lasted 186 minutes. Traffic originated from 2370 autonomous systems in 53 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 181.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 186 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.534 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.039% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.51% |
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 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 188 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?