On Sunday 29 May 2022 at 22:57 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a airline booking customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 331.9 Gbps and lasted 19 minutes. Traffic originated from 1701 autonomous systems in 73 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 331.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 19 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.111 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.000% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 13 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.