On Wednesday 18 September 2024 at 19:06 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 57.0 Gbps and lasted 82 minutes. Traffic originated from 2188 autonomous systems in 43 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 57.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 82 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.624 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.012% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.64% |
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 12 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?