On Monday 18 September 2023 at 15:26 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a gaming community customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 266.9 Gbps and lasted 102 minutes. Traffic originated from 1782 autonomous systems in 33 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 266.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 102 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.878 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.