On Wednesday 18 October 2023 at 01:31 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a municipal services customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 282.0 Gbps and lasted 142 minutes. Traffic originated from 4051 autonomous systems in 103 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 282.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 142 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.293 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.061% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 17 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Clear and practical, thanks.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.