On Wednesday 3 December 2025 at 07:58 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a sports betting customer in North America. The attack peaked at 15.6 Gbps and lasted 47 minutes. Traffic originated from 2889 autonomous systems in 62 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 15.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 47 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.381 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.20% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 37 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.