On Saturday 4 November 2023 at 05:04 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a sports betting customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 32.1 Gbps and lasted 184 minutes. Traffic originated from 1139 autonomous systems in 46 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 32.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 184 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.926 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.044% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.