On Monday 28 November 2022 at 17:12 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a sports betting customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 209.8 million requests per second and lasted 6 minutes. Traffic originated from 1649 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 209.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 6 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.706 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.41% |
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 231 within 12 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.