On Tuesday 2 April 2024 at 18:30 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 334.6 Gbps and lasted 15 minutes. Traffic originated from 979 autonomous systems in 17 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 334.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 15 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.568 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.084% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.39% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 40 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.