On Monday 26 April 2021 at 18:08 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a online casino customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 42.6 Gbps and lasted 42 minutes. Traffic originated from 3248 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 42.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 42 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.612 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.075% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.41% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 17 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.