On Saturday 27 January 2024 at 15:41 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 77.0 million requests per second and lasted 141 minutes. Traffic originated from 2157 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 77.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 141 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.473 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.088% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.20% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 896 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?