On Sunday 2 January 2022 at 14:14 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a gaming community customer in North America. The attack peaked at 102.1 Gbps and lasted 61 minutes. Traffic originated from 3950 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 102.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 61 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.010 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.034% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 42 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.