On Tuesday 25 October 2022 at 20:07 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a fashion retail customer in North America. The attack peaked at 376.9 Gbps and lasted 112 minutes. Traffic originated from 3655 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 376.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 112 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.274 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.43% |
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 13 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.