On Friday 28 October 2022 at 16:13 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a gaming community customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 4.0 Gbps and lasted 71 minutes. Traffic originated from 1217 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 4.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 71 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.045 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.063% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 18 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.