On Tuesday 16 May 2023 at 19:33 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 361.7 million requests per second and lasted 166 minutes. Traffic originated from 2002 autonomous systems in 25 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 361.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 166 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.768 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.11% |
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 235 within 6 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 76 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?