On Friday 6 December 2024 at 23:06 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a online payments customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 406.9 million requests per second and lasted 43 minutes. Traffic originated from 260 autonomous systems in 49 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 406.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 43 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.671 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.080% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 407 within 12 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.