On Thursday 7 July 2022 at 11:54 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a sports betting customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 883.3 million requests per second and lasted 53 minutes. Traffic originated from 2728 autonomous systems in 33 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 883.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 53 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.949 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.089% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.61% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 845 within 24 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 20 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.