On Wednesday 17 April 2024 at 23:24 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a education platform customer in North America. The attack peaked at 294.5 Gbps and lasted 46 minutes. Traffic originated from 3099 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 294.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 46 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.101 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.069% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 17 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.