On Saturday 2 September 2023 at 18:45 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a ticketing customer in North America. The attack peaked at 214.5 Gbps and lasted 158 minutes. Traffic originated from 415 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 214.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 158 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.552 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 26 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?