On Thursday 5 December 2024 at 07:09 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a online payments customer in North America. The attack peaked at 202.1 Gbps and lasted 178 minutes. Traffic originated from 1922 autonomous systems in 46 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 202.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 178 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.103 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.22% |
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 22 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.