On Friday 16 September 2022 at 12:56 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a healthcare portal customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 46.5 million requests per second and lasted 108 minutes. Traffic originated from 1347 autonomous systems in 87 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 46.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 108 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.826 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.072% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.51% |
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 79 within 6 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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.