Threat Bulletin 1263: credential stuffing against a municipal services platform in Iberia

On Friday 26 December 2025 at 00:00 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a municipal services customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 55.9 million requests per second and lasted 85 minutes. Traffic originated from 1475 autonomous systems in 105 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.

Vector credential stuffing
Peak 55.9 million requests per second
Duration 85 min
Time to mitigation 0.224 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.029%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.32%

Timeline

The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 238 within 12 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

A brief increase in p99 latency of 169 ms during the first minute, then normal service.

Recommendations

  • Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
  • Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
  • Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.

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