On Friday 11 September 2026 at 21:58 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 94.4 Gbps and lasted 179 minutes. Traffic originated from 1017 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 94.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 179 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.766 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.047% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 35 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.