On Monday 8 August 2022 at 16:24 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a online payments customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 255.7 Gbps and lasted 53 minutes. Traffic originated from 705 autonomous systems in 44 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 255.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 53 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.290 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.062% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.56% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 40 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.