On Tuesday 25 January 2022 at 20:20 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 272.3 Gbps and lasted 185 minutes. Traffic originated from 893 autonomous systems in 16 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 272.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 185 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.689 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.041% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.15% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.