On Saturday 9 March 2024 at 16:11 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 950.6 million requests per second and lasted 171 minutes. Traffic originated from 553 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 950.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 171 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.546 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.059% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 676 within 26 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.