On Friday 20 February 2026 at 13:32 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a education platform customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 118.1 Gbps and lasted 101 minutes. Traffic originated from 3923 autonomous systems in 11 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 118.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 101 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.277 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.056% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.08% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 24 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.