On Monday 22 May 2023 at 08:03 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 322.6 million requests per second and lasted 82 minutes. Traffic originated from 274 autonomous systems in 30 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 322.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 82 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.486 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.65% |
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 163 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 109 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.