On Saturday 23 July 2022 at 18:18 UTC, a SYN flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 281.4 Gbps and lasted 27 minutes. Traffic originated from 1040 autonomous systems in 72 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | SYN flood |
| Peak | 281.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 27 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.430 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.008% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 22 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?