On Friday 4 November 2022 at 23:47 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a online casino customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 679.7 million requests per second and lasted 187 minutes. Traffic originated from 1643 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 679.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 187 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.088 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.59% |
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 664 within 37 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.