On Wednesday 8 May 2024 at 21:43 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a airline booking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 354.8 Gbps and lasted 20 minutes. Traffic originated from 3751 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 354.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 20 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.629 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.055% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.28% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 13 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?