On Sunday 12 May 2024 at 01:35 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 20.1 million requests per second and lasted 54 minutes. Traffic originated from 1889 autonomous systems in 59 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 20.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 54 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.135 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.029% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.07% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 306 within 6 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.