On Friday 8 November 2024 at 20:40 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 780.6 million requests per second and lasted 144 minutes. Traffic originated from 1630 autonomous systems in 41 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 780.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 144 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.690 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
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 499 within 22 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 145 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
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.