On Friday 25 April 2025 at 07:36 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 197.5 million requests per second and lasted 154 minutes. Traffic originated from 3568 autonomous systems in 92 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 197.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 154 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.547 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.005% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.42% |
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 565 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.