On Saturday 7 August 2021 at 15:53 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a online casino customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 300.2 million requests per second and lasted 92 minutes. Traffic originated from 3120 autonomous systems in 66 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 300.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 92 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.196 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 499 within 17 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.