On Thursday 23 April 2026 at 01:33 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 486.3 million requests per second and lasted 89 minutes. Traffic originated from 1002 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 486.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 89 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.693 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.053% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.07% |
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 313 within 27 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.