On Tuesday 18 May 2021 at 15:48 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 641.5 million requests per second and lasted 141 minutes. Traffic originated from 644 autonomous systems in 35 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 641.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 141 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.752 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.045% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.12% |
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 564 within 7 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.