On Tuesday 16 December 2025 at 02:40 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a airline booking customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 106.0 Gbps and lasted 144 minutes. Traffic originated from 1664 autonomous systems in 29 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 106.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 144 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.116 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
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 33 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.