On Saturday 15 June 2024 at 02:32 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a fashion retail customer in North America. The attack peaked at 779.0 million requests per second and lasted 107 minutes. Traffic originated from 1229 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 779.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 107 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.256 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.082% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 805 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?