On Saturday 9 May 2026 at 15:52 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in North America. The attack peaked at 131.4 Gbps and lasted 7 minutes. Traffic originated from 1563 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 131.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 7 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.074 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.072% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.11% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 76 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.