On Saturday 11 June 2022 at 01:53 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a fashion retail customer in North America. The attack peaked at 257.0 million requests per second and lasted 178 minutes. Traffic originated from 2107 autonomous systems in 33 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 257.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 178 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.862 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.069% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.12% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 312 within 25 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.