On Wednesday 5 January 2022 at 14:49 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a developer platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 460.0 million requests per second and lasted 50 minutes. Traffic originated from 2215 autonomous systems in 48 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 460.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 50 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.402 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.065% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
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 273 within 36 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Clear and practical, thanks.