On Friday 29 April 2022 at 10:04 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 229.5 Gbps and lasted 142 minutes. Traffic originated from 665 autonomous systems in 73 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 229.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 142 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.408 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.001% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.47% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.