On Sunday 1 September 2024 at 23:38 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a video streaming customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 593.2 million requests per second and lasted 109 minutes. Traffic originated from 660 autonomous systems in 91 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 593.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 109 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.532 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.062% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.75% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 874 within 5 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.