On Thursday 19 May 2022 at 17:45 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 292.6 million requests per second and lasted 80 minutes. Traffic originated from 535 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 292.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 80 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.246 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
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 104 within 23 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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?