On Wednesday 30 October 2024 at 15:19 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a municipal services customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 73.9 Gbps and lasted 142 minutes. Traffic originated from 3901 autonomous systems in 75 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 73.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 142 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.134 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
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 24 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.