On Sunday 11 August 2024 at 12:05 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a education platform customer in North America. The attack peaked at 111.4 Gbps and lasted 92 minutes. Traffic originated from 2070 autonomous systems in 108 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 111.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 92 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.890 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.004% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.32% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 63 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?