On Sunday 12 April 2026 at 11:56 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a airline booking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 148.5 million requests per second and lasted 98 minutes. Traffic originated from 2893 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 148.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 98 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.302 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.069% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.59% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 530 within 22 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.