On Monday 18 December 2023 at 04:37 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a sports betting customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 327.8 Gbps and lasted 26 minutes. Traffic originated from 1772 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 327.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 26 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.366 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.29% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 26 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.