On Wednesday 23 November 2022 at 03:35 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in North America. The attack peaked at 146.5 million requests per second and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 4165 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 146.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.944 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.056% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 344 within 26 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 42 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.