On Saturday 20 December 2025 at 00:25 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 859.4 million requests per second and lasted 90 minutes. Traffic originated from 3372 autonomous systems in 15 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 859.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 90 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.011 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.026% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
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 726 within 12 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.