On Tuesday 1 April 2025 at 00:20 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a sports betting customer in North America. The attack peaked at 356.2 Gbps and lasted 33 minutes. Traffic originated from 687 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 356.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 33 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.889 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.089% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.73% |
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 28 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?