On Tuesday 6 July 2021 at 20:55 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 404.2 million requests per second and lasted 34 minutes. Traffic originated from 3675 autonomous systems in 56 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 404.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 34 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.264 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.62% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 60 within 13 seconds. The risk score of participating clients crossed the challenge threshold automatically and proof-of-work difficulty rose with origin load.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.