On Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 18:44 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a online payments customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 195.9 million requests per second and lasted 20 minutes. Traffic originated from 1951 autonomous systems in 86 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 195.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 20 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.872 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.072% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
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 734 within 10 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 209 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
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.