On Thursday 14 November 2024 at 08:11 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a video streaming customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 239.2 Gbps and lasted 65 minutes. Traffic originated from 692 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 239.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 65 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.555 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.64% |
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 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
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.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.