On Wednesday 23 October 2024 at 08:17 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a gaming community customer in North America. The attack peaked at 130.1 million requests per second and lasted 135 minutes. Traffic originated from 2978 autonomous systems in 91 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 130.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 135 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.423 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.054% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 255 within 37 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.