On Friday 22 November 2024 at 00:31 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a ticketing customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 218.5 Gbps and lasted 36 minutes. Traffic originated from 2927 autonomous systems in 102 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 218.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 36 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.182 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.037% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?