Government Agency Cybersecurity Drill - DDoS Defense

How a national healthcare portal maintained availability during a 1.2TB/s coordinated cyberattack

Scenario Overview

During peak pandemic response, a national healthcare agency's online vaccination registration system faced a sustained DDoS attack. The case study examines how they maintained 99.94% uptime while serving critical public health functions.

Attack Peak

1.2TB/s

Highest throughput recorded

Users Served

380,000+

Concurrent successful accesses

Mitigated Traffic

89.7%

DDoS attack traffic blocked

Challenges Faced

Volumetric Attack

  • 1.2TB/s connection flood attack
  • HTTP/2 priority boosting evasion
  • Geographically distributed sources

Targeted Systems

  • Authentication endpoints
  • Booking slot database
  • Legacy API interfaces

Defense Architecture

Cloudflare Government Edition AWS WAF In-line FortiGate DDoS traffic
  • Multi-tier defense: 500Gbps-capable scrubbing centers
  • Anycast deployment: 18 regional edge nodes
  • Behavioral analysis: 50+ heuristic detection models
  • Failover: 800ms automatic BGP routing

Performance Metrics

99.94%

Service availability

42

Active mitigation strategies

2.8ms

Request latency

Post-Incident Analysis

Strenghts

  • Redundant infrastructure handled 400% baseline load
  • AI traffic analysis reduced false positives by 72%
  • Automated mitigation triggered within 180ms

Improvements

  • Added 3 additional scrubbing centers
  • Improved logging for 15 legacy endpoints
  • Quarterly resilience drills (previously bi-annual)