On Monday 8 June 2026 at 14:35 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 389.4 million requests per second and lasted 93 minutes. Traffic originated from 3649 autonomous systems in 97 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 389.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 93 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.750 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.068% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 763 within 37 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
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.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.