On Sunday 20 October 2024 at 13:10 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a video streaming customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 139.2 million requests per second and lasted 186 minutes. Traffic originated from 2948 autonomous systems in 10 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 139.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 186 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.343 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.081% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
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 109 within 31 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.