On Thursday 26 September 2024 at 20:59 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a B2B SaaS customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 97.8 Gbps and lasted 71 minutes. Traffic originated from 3087 autonomous systems in 34 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 97.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 71 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.785 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.030% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 32 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.