On Tuesday 14 October 2025 at 00:28 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a retail banking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 227.3 million requests per second and lasted 149 minutes. Traffic originated from 1990 autonomous systems in 37 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 227.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 149 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.430 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.051% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
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 851 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.