On Monday 8 May 2023 at 00:01 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a online payments customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 27.5 Gbps and lasted 27 minutes. Traffic originated from 857 autonomous systems in 89 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 27.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 27 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.852 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.047% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 16 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.