On Thursday 10 October 2024 at 23:01 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a online payments customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 194.5 Gbps and lasted 169 minutes. Traffic originated from 203 autonomous systems in 36 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 194.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 169 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.711 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.021% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
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 20 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.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.