On Saturday 29 June 2024 at 03:41 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a airline booking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 128.9 Gbps and lasted 94 minutes. Traffic originated from 153 autonomous systems in 69 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 128.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 94 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.050 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.085% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.11% |
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 30 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.