On Monday 19 February 2024 at 09:53 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 104.7 million requests per second and lasted 88 minutes. Traffic originated from 2325 autonomous systems in 90 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 104.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 88 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.760 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.006% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.68% |
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 882 within 24 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.