On Tuesday 24 February 2026 at 11:34 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 58.3 Gbps and lasted 154 minutes. Traffic originated from 615 autonomous systems in 52 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 58.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 154 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.315 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.64% |
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 16 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.