On Wednesday 19 August 2026 at 03:58 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a gaming community customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 593.5 million requests per second and lasted 7 minutes. Traffic originated from 2647 autonomous systems in 81 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 593.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 7 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.085 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.052% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 523 within 16 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.