On Monday 28 March 2022 at 08:26 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a healthcare portal customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 196.0 Gbps and lasted 129 minutes. Traffic originated from 2944 autonomous systems in 115 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 196.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 129 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.650 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.041% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.11% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 39 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.