On Saturday 1 July 2023 at 11:48 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 79.6 Gbps and lasted 181 minutes. Traffic originated from 348 autonomous systems in 115 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 79.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 181 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.368 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.65% |
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 17 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?