On Wednesday 2 July 2025 at 22:33 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 652.5 million requests per second and lasted 13 minutes. Traffic originated from 2350 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 652.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 13 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.939 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.067% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.64% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 811 within 6 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.