On Thursday 29 September 2022 at 13:55 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a developer platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 233.6 million requests per second and lasted 143 minutes. Traffic originated from 1714 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 233.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 143 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.600 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.086% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.29% |
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 682 within 36 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 112 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.