On Thursday 29 January 2026 at 20:06 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 280.4 Gbps and lasted 140 minutes. Traffic originated from 4031 autonomous systems in 51 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 280.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 140 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.389 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.12% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 20 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.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.