On Wednesday 24 July 2024 at 17:50 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 610.3 million requests per second and lasted 96 minutes. Traffic originated from 3835 autonomous systems in 78 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 610.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 96 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.888 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.068% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
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 631 within 21 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.