On Saturday 23 November 2024 at 17:11 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a news publisher customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 447.8 million requests per second and lasted 69 minutes. Traffic originated from 4187 autonomous systems in 83 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 447.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 69 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.850 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.089% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 550 within 13 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.