On Friday 25 March 2022 at 13:26 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 120.3 million requests per second and lasted 152 minutes. Traffic originated from 669 autonomous systems in 52 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 120.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 152 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.804 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.081% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.62% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 724 within 7 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
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.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.