On Friday 16 August 2024 at 20:08 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 285.7 Gbps and lasted 84 minutes. Traffic originated from 529 autonomous systems in 23 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 285.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 84 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.480 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 25 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.