On Sunday 30 November 2025 at 11:51 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a B2B SaaS customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 175.0 Gbps and lasted 64 minutes. Traffic originated from 2852 autonomous systems in 55 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 175.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 64 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.205 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.081% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.