On Sunday 3 December 2023 at 07:36 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 177.4 Gbps and lasted 138 minutes. Traffic originated from 3575 autonomous systems in 22 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 177.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 138 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.924 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.35% |
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 16 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.