On Saturday 20 July 2024 at 01:20 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 50.3 Gbps and lasted 52 minutes. Traffic originated from 3455 autonomous systems in 45 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 50.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 52 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.547 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.031% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 105 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?