On Wednesday 26 March 2025 at 18:39 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 960.6 million requests per second and lasted 166 minutes. Traffic originated from 2594 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 960.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 166 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.164 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.012% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.53% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 605 within 36 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?