On Wednesday 12 February 2025 at 23:02 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 477.5 million requests per second and lasted 169 minutes. Traffic originated from 2321 autonomous systems in 39 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 477.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 169 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.149 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.009% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
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 603 within 22 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.