On Thursday 10 November 2022 at 02:13 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a education platform customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 367.8 Gbps and lasted 174 minutes. Traffic originated from 4193 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 367.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 174 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.688 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
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 14 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.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.