On Monday 4 November 2024 at 02:29 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 335.6 million requests per second and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 2944 autonomous systems in 43 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 335.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 133 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.249 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.71% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 51 within 28 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Clear and practical, thanks.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.