On Wednesday 13 August 2025 at 00:18 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 59.4 Gbps and lasted 179 minutes. Traffic originated from 3352 autonomous systems in 19 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 59.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 179 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.768 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.73% |
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 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.