On Monday 8 April 2024 at 12:04 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a sports betting customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 269.4 million requests per second and lasted 12 minutes. Traffic originated from 3091 autonomous systems in 115 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 269.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 12 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.848 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.001% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.43% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 348 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 71 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?