On Thursday 16 March 2023 at 03:22 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 162.5 Gbps and lasted 130 minutes. Traffic originated from 1243 autonomous systems in 8 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 162.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 130 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.469 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.049% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.76% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 34 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.