On Wednesday 11 September 2024 at 19:01 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a airline booking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 280.8 Gbps and lasted 4 minutes. Traffic originated from 3399 autonomous systems in 69 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 280.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 4 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.879 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.044% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.34% |
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 14 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 105 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?