On Monday 26 February 2024 at 10:08 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 809.4 million requests per second and lasted 147 minutes. Traffic originated from 1836 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 809.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 147 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.310 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.21% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 481 within 17 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.