On Sunday 21 September 2025 at 07:13 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a gaming community customer in North America. The attack peaked at 227.2 million requests per second and lasted 95 minutes. Traffic originated from 2962 autonomous systems in 62 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 227.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 95 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.408 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.50% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 427 within 22 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.