On Saturday 17 September 2022 at 19:56 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 37.7 Gbps and lasted 145 minutes. Traffic originated from 864 autonomous systems in 48 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 37.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 145 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.195 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.15% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. 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 162 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
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.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?