On Tuesday 28 June 2022 at 12:50 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 657.8 million requests per second and lasted 138 minutes. Traffic originated from 1011 autonomous systems in 70 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 657.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 138 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.138 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.073% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.67% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 862 within 12 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Clear and practical, thanks.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?