On Wednesday 9 June 2021 at 03:13 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a fashion retail customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 208.2 Gbps and lasted 48 minutes. Traffic originated from 3449 autonomous systems in 54 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 208.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 48 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.777 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.64% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 24 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.