On Tuesday 1 June 2021 at 13:05 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a fashion retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 244.1 Gbps and lasted 87 minutes. Traffic originated from 1067 autonomous systems in 53 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 244.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 87 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.648 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.015% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.29% |
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 29 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?