On Sunday 19 April 2026 at 09:58 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in North America. The attack peaked at 101.6 million requests per second and lasted 121 minutes. Traffic originated from 1665 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 101.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 121 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.344 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.48% |
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 591 within 14 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 114 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?