On Sunday 24 October 2021 at 12:22 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 18.6 million requests per second and lasted 40 minutes. Traffic originated from 2450 autonomous systems in 17 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 18.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 40 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.529 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.002% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 653 within 17 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 197 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.