On Saturday 16 July 2022 at 13:29 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a online payments customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 67.0 Gbps and lasted 158 minutes. Traffic originated from 3576 autonomous systems in 41 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 67.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 158 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.261 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.077% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 12 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 234 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.