On Friday 1 September 2023 at 09:26 UTC, a UDP reflection (DNS) targeted a news publisher customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 135.9 Gbps and lasted 54 minutes. Traffic originated from 761 autonomous systems in 31 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | UDP reflection (DNS) |
| Peak | 135.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 54 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.651 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.016% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
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 40 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.