On Friday 12 May 2023 at 22:08 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a healthcare portal customer in North America. The attack peaked at 284.9 Gbps and lasted 135 minutes. Traffic originated from 2705 autonomous systems in 58 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 284.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 135 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.010 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.68% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 20 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?