On Thursday 15 February 2024 at 07:43 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 141.6 Gbps and lasted 74 minutes. Traffic originated from 218 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 141.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 74 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.346 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.16% |
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 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 32 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.