On Wednesday 15 September 2021 at 11:20 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a online casino customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 733.2 million requests per second and lasted 38 minutes. Traffic originated from 2931 autonomous systems in 15 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 733.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 38 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.105 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.048% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 487 within 39 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Clear and practical, thanks.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?