On Monday 7 March 2022 at 14:59 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 52.9 million requests per second and lasted 89 minutes. Traffic originated from 3197 autonomous systems in 90 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 52.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 89 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.153 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.026% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.15% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 867 within 19 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?