On Sunday 11 September 2022 at 00:13 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 198.4 million requests per second and lasted 26 minutes. Traffic originated from 2748 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 198.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 26 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.543 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.051% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 699 within 5 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.