On Sunday 27 February 2022 at 11:21 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a electronics retail customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 348.4 Gbps and lasted 179 minutes. Traffic originated from 2159 autonomous systems in 35 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 348.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 179 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.867 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.068% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
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 18 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.