On Thursday 22 February 2024 at 05:24 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 171.3 million requests per second and lasted 43 minutes. Traffic originated from 1705 autonomous systems in 91 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 171.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 43 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.260 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.004% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
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 544 within 32 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.