On Monday 26 August 2024 at 07:38 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a education platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 324.7 Gbps and lasted 34 minutes. Traffic originated from 1791 autonomous systems in 7 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 324.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 34 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.871 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.030% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.08% |
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 39 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 224 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?