On Tuesday 27 December 2022 at 13:34 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a online payments customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 432.0 million requests per second and lasted 187 minutes. Traffic originated from 2788 autonomous systems in 19 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 432.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 187 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.934 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.065% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
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 654 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.