On Tuesday 30 August 2022 at 04:59 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a gaming community customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 851.2 million requests per second and lasted 82 minutes. Traffic originated from 821 autonomous systems in 108 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 851.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 82 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.509 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.022% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
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 743 within 16 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 27 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.