On Wednesday 22 November 2023 at 01:20 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 292.9 Gbps and lasted 161 minutes. Traffic originated from 2729 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 292.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 161 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.426 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.08% |
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 37 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.