On Friday 7 June 2024 at 06:56 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 581.9 million requests per second and lasted 156 minutes. Traffic originated from 3644 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 581.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 156 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.490 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.079% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 435 within 20 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?