Threat Bulletin 1415: search endpoint flood against a crypto exchange platform in North America

On Saturday 25 July 2026 at 18:02 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in North America. The attack peaked at 208.0 million requests per second and lasted 128 minutes. Traffic originated from 1718 autonomous systems in 18 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.

Vector search endpoint flood
Peak 208.0 million requests per second
Duration 128 min
Time to mitigation 0.236 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.064%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.72%

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 466 within 40 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

  • Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
  • Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
  • Enable authenticated origin pulls.

5 thoughts on “Threat Bulletin 1415: search endpoint flood against a crypto exchange platform in North America”

  1. We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.

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