On Monday 14 November 2022 at 08:12 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 214.1 Gbps and lasted 100 minutes. Traffic originated from 96 autonomous systems in 94 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 214.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 100 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.869 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.051% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 35 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.