On Tuesday 23 July 2024 at 03:39 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a sports betting customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 63.7 Gbps and lasted 95 minutes. Traffic originated from 2127 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 63.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 95 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.483 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.007% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.19% |
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 34 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.