On Thursday 25 July 2024 at 20:50 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 940.7 million requests per second and lasted 162 minutes. Traffic originated from 3894 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 940.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 162 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.539 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 806 within 40 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.