On Friday 16 January 2026 at 13:25 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a fashion retail customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 239.8 million requests per second and lasted 112 minutes. Traffic originated from 2718 autonomous systems in 58 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 239.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 112 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.192 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.082% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.79% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.