On Wednesday 19 June 2024 at 08:23 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a online payments customer in North America. The attack peaked at 12.4 million requests per second and lasted 77 minutes. Traffic originated from 1702 autonomous systems in 57 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 12.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 77 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.928 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.058% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 49 within 14 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.