On Saturday 15 October 2022 at 03:56 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 316.4 Gbps and lasted 169 minutes. Traffic originated from 690 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 316.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 169 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.468 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.19% |
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 20 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 237 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.