On Thursday 11 April 2024 at 00:55 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a airline booking customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 309.4 Gbps and lasted 63 minutes. Traffic originated from 2938 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 309.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 63 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.285 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.024% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.79% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 13 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.