On Thursday 12 March 2026 at 22:55 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 802.6 million requests per second and lasted 170 minutes. Traffic originated from 2404 autonomous systems in 15 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 802.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 170 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.810 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 710 within 30 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.