On Sunday 5 January 2025 at 23:27 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a developer platform customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 363.8 million requests per second and lasted 171 minutes. Traffic originated from 235 autonomous systems in 99 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 363.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 171 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.574 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.20% |
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 473 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.