Threat Bulletin 1007: search endpoint flood against a education platform platform in Western Europe

On Tuesday 7 January 2025 at 05:50 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 167.3 million requests per second and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 1542 autonomous systems in 100 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.

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 231 within 26 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.
• Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
• Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.