On Wednesday 8 January 2025 at 10:32 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a electronics retail customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 113.7 Gbps and lasted 31 minutes. Traffic originated from 1619 autonomous systems in 49 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 113.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 31 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.697 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.031% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
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 24 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.