On Thursday 23 May 2024 at 23:17 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 759.7 million requests per second and lasted 103 minutes. Traffic originated from 1432 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 759.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 103 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.503 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.047% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.35% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 266 within 7 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.