On Thursday 30 December 2021 at 21:09 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 475.1 million requests per second and lasted 132 minutes. Traffic originated from 607 autonomous systems in 22 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 475.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 132 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.762 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.051% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.34% |
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 575 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?