On Thursday 2 October 2025 at 12:35 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a retail banking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 233.5 Gbps and lasted 138 minutes. Traffic originated from 336 autonomous systems in 31 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 233.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 138 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.392 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.017% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?