On Saturday 4 March 2023 at 08:14 UTC, a CLDAP reflection targeted a gaming community customer in North America. The attack peaked at 219.0 Gbps and lasted 87 minutes. Traffic originated from 704 autonomous systems in 75 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | CLDAP reflection |
| Peak | 219.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 87 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.819 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.022% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
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 25 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Clear and practical, thanks.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?