On Saturday 13 August 2022 at 06:12 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a developer platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 410.3 million requests per second and lasted 140 minutes. Traffic originated from 760 autonomous systems in 40 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 410.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 140 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.094 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.072% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.74% |
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 137 within 34 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.