On Monday 17 November 2025 at 07:40 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 32.8 Gbps and lasted 19 minutes. Traffic originated from 1716 autonomous systems in 97 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 32.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 19 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.534 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.076% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.73% |
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 18 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.