On Tuesday 12 March 2024 at 10:46 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 36.1 million requests per second and lasted 9 minutes. Traffic originated from 3590 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 36.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 9 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.914 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.007% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 773 within 28 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.