On Monday 16 December 2024 at 20:52 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a gaming community customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 22.1 million requests per second and lasted 54 minutes. Traffic originated from 2117 autonomous systems in 27 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 22.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 54 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.430 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.068% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.26% |
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 98 within 21 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.