On Tuesday 24 December 2024 at 01:20 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a retail banking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 929.9 million requests per second and lasted 24 minutes. Traffic originated from 2592 autonomous systems in 110 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 929.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 24 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.653 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 633 within 27 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.