On Friday 1 March 2024 at 12:24 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a developer platform customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 618.7 million requests per second and lasted 39 minutes. Traffic originated from 1318 autonomous systems in 17 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 618.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 39 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.223 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.75% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 551 within 28 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 206 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.