On Friday 20 January 2023 at 04:10 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a sports betting customer in North America. The attack peaked at 538.0 million requests per second and lasted 15 minutes. Traffic originated from 701 autonomous systems in 101 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 538.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 15 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.625 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.017% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
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 61 within 26 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.