On Friday 18 November 2022 at 14:00 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 964.8 million requests per second and lasted 47 minutes. Traffic originated from 353 autonomous systems in 7 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 964.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 47 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.613 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.012% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.02% |
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 195 within 13 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.