On Saturday 7 May 2022 at 16:00 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a developer platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 729.9 million requests per second and lasted 108 minutes. Traffic originated from 4071 autonomous systems in 54 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 729.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 108 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.444 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.058% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.51% |
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 784 within 21 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.