On Thursday 22 January 2026 at 19:15 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a gaming community customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 256.5 Gbps and lasted 166 minutes. Traffic originated from 2562 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 256.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 166 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.228 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.040% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.65% |
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 23 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.