On Monday 1 July 2024 at 23:47 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 308.7 Gbps and lasted 57 minutes. Traffic originated from 1275 autonomous systems in 12 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 308.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 57 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.357 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 18 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.