On Friday 15 November 2024 at 09:48 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a ticketing customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 108.1 Gbps and lasted 189 minutes. Traffic originated from 2332 autonomous systems in 101 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 108.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 189 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.897 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.009% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.51% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Clear and practical, thanks.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.