On Wednesday 13 October 2021 at 19:39 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a fashion retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 351.2 Gbps and lasted 10 minutes. Traffic originated from 1243 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 351.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 10 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.040 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.052% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.63% |
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 31 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.