On Saturday 14 September 2024 at 01:03 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a sports betting customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 643.8 million requests per second and lasted 180 minutes. Traffic originated from 350 autonomous systems in 100 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 643.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 180 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.590 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.085% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 784 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 60 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
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.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.