On Wednesday 18 December 2024 at 01:01 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a sports betting customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 47.2 Gbps and lasted 125 minutes. Traffic originated from 3328 autonomous systems in 55 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 47.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 125 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.441 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.13% |
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 24 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.