On Tuesday 1 September 2026 at 12:20 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in North America. The attack peaked at 846.2 million requests per second and lasted 75 minutes. Traffic originated from 1020 autonomous systems in 81 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 846.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 75 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.107 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.002% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.69% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 299 within 23 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.