On Friday 8 August 2025 at 21:23 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a gaming community customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 310.1 Gbps and lasted 176 minutes. Traffic originated from 2458 autonomous systems in 40 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 310.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 176 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.277 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.070% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.21% |
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 13 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.