On Tuesday 30 March 2021 at 23:21 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 683.1 million requests per second and lasted 68 minutes. Traffic originated from 2679 autonomous systems in 82 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 683.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 68 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.478 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.20% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 216 within 31 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 47 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.