On Sunday 2 October 2022 at 02:36 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 959.0 million requests per second and lasted 114 minutes. Traffic originated from 122 autonomous systems in 111 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 959.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 114 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.885 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.017% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
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 625 within 33 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.