On Wednesday 9 August 2023 at 15:17 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 913.6 million requests per second and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 1929 autonomous systems in 99 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 913.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.540 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.045% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.11% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 387 within 16 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.