On Sunday 22 September 2024 at 20:47 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a sports betting customer in North America. The attack peaked at 125.9 Gbps and lasted 164 minutes. Traffic originated from 2177 autonomous systems in 20 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 125.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 164 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.196 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.030% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.58% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.