On Friday 30 December 2022 at 03:03 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a tax authority portal customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 46.9 Gbps and lasted 44 minutes. Traffic originated from 2859 autonomous systems in 31 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 46.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 44 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.701 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.059% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.59% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 16 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.