On Friday 24 April 2026 at 04:54 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a tax authority portal customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 276.0 Gbps and lasted 114 minutes. Traffic originated from 3898 autonomous systems in 93 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 276.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 114 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.503 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.066% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.13% |
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 22 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.