On Sunday 10 December 2023 at 17:21 UTC, a GRE flood targeted a video streaming customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 194.0 Gbps and lasted 69 minutes. Traffic originated from 1284 autonomous systems in 72 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | GRE flood |
| Peak | 194.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 69 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.551 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.020% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.75% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 21 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.