On Sunday 12 June 2022 at 18:26 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a news publisher customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 189.1 Gbps and lasted 113 minutes. Traffic originated from 708 autonomous systems in 8 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 189.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 113 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.262 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.063% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.71% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.