On Thursday 28 September 2023 at 05:25 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 626.9 million requests per second and lasted 168 minutes. Traffic originated from 2611 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 626.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 168 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.793 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
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 488 within 27 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.