On Thursday 27 August 2026 at 21:48 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 811.7 million requests per second and lasted 100 minutes. Traffic originated from 3552 autonomous systems in 12 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 811.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 100 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.683 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.023% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.47% |
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 424 within 37 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 170 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.