On Sunday 8 August 2021 at 20:16 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a gaming community customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 11.7 Gbps and lasted 13 minutes. Traffic originated from 958 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 11.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 13 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.036 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.079% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
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 28 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.