On Tuesday 23 December 2025 at 02:16 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a airline booking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 360.3 million requests per second and lasted 28 minutes. Traffic originated from 684 autonomous systems in 35 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 360.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 28 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.483 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.079% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 536 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.