On Thursday 11 December 2025 at 20:46 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 544.1 million requests per second and lasted 7 minutes. Traffic originated from 127 autonomous systems in 80 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 544.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 7 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.495 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.007% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
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 556 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 40 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.