On Saturday 1 January 2022 at 10:29 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a fashion retail customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 679.4 million requests per second and lasted 103 minutes. Traffic originated from 3253 autonomous systems in 17 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 679.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 103 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.561 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.087% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 564 within 16 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.