On Wednesday 5 April 2023 at 08:41 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a ticketing customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 382.1 Gbps and lasted 5 minutes. Traffic originated from 3246 autonomous systems in 52 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 382.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 5 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.416 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.080% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.11% |
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 29 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.