Threat Bulletin 0292: search endpoint flood against a retail banking platform in Latin America

On Wednesday 6 April 2022 at 22:19 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a retail banking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 761.1 million requests per second and lasted 63 minutes. Traffic originated from 3495 autonomous systems in 81 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.

Vector search endpoint flood
Peak 761.1 million requests per second
Duration 63 min
Time to mitigation 0.579 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.014%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.21%

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 653 within 29 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.
  • Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.

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