On Tuesday 2 March 2021 at 17:16 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a video streaming customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 110.2 Gbps and lasted 110 minutes. Traffic originated from 3113 autonomous systems in 51 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 110.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 110 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.785 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.075% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.