On Tuesday 6 September 2022 at 12:39 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a municipal services customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 345.9 Gbps and lasted 161 minutes. Traffic originated from 3743 autonomous systems in 29 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 345.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 161 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.121 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.52% |
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 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?