On Sunday 7 December 2025 at 03:56 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 860.8 million requests per second and lasted 15 minutes. Traffic originated from 1787 autonomous systems in 15 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 860.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 15 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.384 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.79% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 391 within 32 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.