On Sunday 22 December 2024 at 19:46 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 767.6 million requests per second and lasted 67 minutes. Traffic originated from 1595 autonomous systems in 67 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 767.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 67 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.532 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.074% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
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 409 within 10 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.