On Wednesday 26 June 2024 at 09:36 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a fashion retail customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 742.4 million requests per second and lasted 23 minutes. Traffic originated from 2017 autonomous systems in 6 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 742.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 23 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.113 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.054% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.22% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 323 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.