On Wednesday 7 June 2023 at 05:19 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 318.3 million requests per second and lasted 156 minutes. Traffic originated from 4054 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 318.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 156 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.575 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.072% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 121 within 34 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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Clear and practical, thanks.