On Thursday 18 July 2024 at 18:13 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in North America. The attack peaked at 648.2 million requests per second and lasted 160 minutes. Traffic originated from 1952 autonomous systems in 69 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 648.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 160 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.602 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.061% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 353 within 16 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.