On Monday 2 February 2026 at 13:31 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 75.6 Gbps and lasted 185 minutes. Traffic originated from 349 autonomous systems in 90 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 75.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 185 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.285 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.000% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 187 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.