On Sunday 19 June 2022 at 13:53 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a retail banking customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 296.9 Gbps and lasted 27 minutes. Traffic originated from 3559 autonomous systems in 100 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 296.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 27 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.922 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.25% |
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 26 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.