On Thursday 4 July 2024 at 23:00 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a news publisher customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 866.4 million requests per second and lasted 5 minutes. Traffic originated from 1352 autonomous systems in 66 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 866.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 5 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.896 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.35% |
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 422 within 13 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 72 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?