On Friday 19 January 2024 at 18:42 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 251.8 Gbps and lasted 10 minutes. Traffic originated from 4081 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 251.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 10 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.653 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.041% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.50% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.