On Friday 22 March 2024 at 06:00 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a airline booking customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 69.5 Gbps and lasted 66 minutes. Traffic originated from 3550 autonomous systems in 102 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 69.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 66 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.384 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
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 21 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 54 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.