On Monday 4 September 2023 at 10:34 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a airline booking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 363.3 Gbps and lasted 147 minutes. Traffic originated from 2224 autonomous systems in 93 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 363.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 147 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.950 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.077% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
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 34 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 24 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.