On Wednesday 16 October 2024 at 16:10 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 124.8 million requests per second and lasted 108 minutes. Traffic originated from 3616 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 124.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 108 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.336 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.001% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.19% |
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 638 within 32 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.