On Saturday 31 December 2022 at 05:19 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a crypto exchange customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 275.2 Gbps and lasted 121 minutes. Traffic originated from 4157 autonomous systems in 43 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 275.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 121 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.130 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.007% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.29% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 22 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.