On Sunday 5 June 2022 at 08:42 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 32.1 Gbps and lasted 127 minutes. Traffic originated from 670 autonomous systems in 55 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 32.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 127 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.519 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.032% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.24% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Clear and practical, thanks.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.