On Monday 10 October 2022 at 23:00 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a video streaming customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 397.5 million requests per second and lasted 37 minutes. Traffic originated from 692 autonomous systems in 55 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 397.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 37 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.908 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.039% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 769 within 38 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Clear and practical, thanks.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.