On Wednesday 25 January 2023 at 15:43 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a municipal services customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 704.4 million requests per second and lasted 89 minutes. Traffic originated from 2263 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 704.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 89 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.425 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.040% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.67% |
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 470 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.