On Sunday 4 December 2022 at 07:43 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a sports betting customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 165.0 million requests per second and lasted 112 minutes. Traffic originated from 2867 autonomous systems in 13 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 165.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 112 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.148 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.68% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 649 within 18 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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.