On Tuesday 19 November 2024 at 07:53 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a fashion retail customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 128.1 million requests per second and lasted 56 minutes. Traffic originated from 1788 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 128.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 56 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.576 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.020% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
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 509 within 14 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 90 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.