On Monday 15 August 2022 at 14:28 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a news publisher customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 141.8 Gbps and lasted 37 minutes. Traffic originated from 1530 autonomous systems in 83 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 141.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 37 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.392 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.019% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
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 19 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.