On Friday 19 April 2024 at 06:32 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a ticketing customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 115.7 Gbps and lasted 175 minutes. Traffic originated from 2747 autonomous systems in 87 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 115.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 175 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.616 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.068% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.75% |
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 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Clear and practical, thanks.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.