On Saturday 12 October 2024 at 02:35 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a news publisher customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 203.1 million requests per second and lasted 132 minutes. Traffic originated from 415 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 203.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 132 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.336 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 777 within 32 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.