On Saturday 17 January 2026 at 23:56 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 240.4 million requests per second and lasted 147 minutes. Traffic originated from 3344 autonomous systems in 42 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 240.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 147 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.288 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.035% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.33% |
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 221 within 25 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?