On Sunday 11 July 2021 at 02:44 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a video streaming customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 425.7 million requests per second and lasted 156 minutes. Traffic originated from 2980 autonomous systems in 112 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 425.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 156 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.304 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.052% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.51% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 261 within 6 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.