On Thursday 7 September 2023 at 19:30 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a retail banking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 949.0 million requests per second and lasted 140 minutes. Traffic originated from 1812 autonomous systems in 105 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 949.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 140 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.936 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.017% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.13% |
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 709 within 5 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 98 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.