On Sunday 11 June 2023 at 06:05 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a gaming community customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 272.7 Gbps and lasted 17 minutes. Traffic originated from 287 autonomous systems in 88 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 272.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 17 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.612 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.50% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 33 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.