On Wednesday 19 January 2022 at 11:58 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a sports betting customer in North America. The attack peaked at 384.1 Gbps and lasted 12 minutes. Traffic originated from 1812 autonomous systems in 111 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 384.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 12 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.148 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.58% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 18 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 55 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.