On Wednesday 27 November 2024 at 19:28 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a gaming community customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 288.3 million requests per second and lasted 168 minutes. Traffic originated from 1567 autonomous systems in 16 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 288.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 168 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.703 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.13% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 657 within 30 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.