On Saturday 8 February 2025 at 14:45 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 16.0 Gbps and lasted 103 minutes. Traffic originated from 659 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 16.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 103 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.240 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.087% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
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 16 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.