On Saturday 24 September 2022 at 00:24 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a news publisher customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 234.3 Gbps and lasted 136 minutes. Traffic originated from 235 autonomous systems in 92 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 234.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 136 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.451 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.004% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.75% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.