On Friday 23 August 2024 at 13:01 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a news publisher customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 832.5 million requests per second and lasted 125 minutes. Traffic originated from 2877 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 832.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 125 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.664 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.023% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 609 within 9 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?