On Thursday 6 October 2022 at 09:26 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 768.5 million requests per second and lasted 113 minutes. Traffic originated from 2322 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 768.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 113 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.262 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.033% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.42% |
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 327 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.