Threat Bulletin 0690: UDP reflection (NTP) against a online casino platform in Central Europe

On Thursday 19 October 2023 at 13:35 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a online casino customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 150.1 Gbps and lasted 167 minutes. Traffic originated from 862 autonomous systems in 53 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.

Vector UDP reflection (NTP)
Peak 150.1 Gbps
Duration 167 min
Time to mitigation 0.101 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.088%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.40%

Timeline

The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 39 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.
  • Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
  • Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.

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