On Saturday 29 August 2026 at 13:44 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 632.4 million requests per second and lasted 6 minutes. Traffic originated from 3573 autonomous systems in 41 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 632.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 6 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.652 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
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 137 within 24 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.