On Friday 31 May 2024 at 21:14 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a airline booking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 205.6 Gbps and lasted 88 minutes. Traffic originated from 2943 autonomous systems in 49 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 205.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 88 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.164 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
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.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.