On Friday 6 October 2023 at 14:23 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 188.7 Gbps and lasted 113 minutes. Traffic originated from 163 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 188.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 113 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.060 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 37 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?