On Friday 29 October 2021 at 15:35 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 683.1 million requests per second and lasted 168 minutes. Traffic originated from 2085 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 683.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 168 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.294 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.079% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 467 within 32 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.