On Tuesday 17 January 2023 at 09:44 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a video streaming customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 132.0 million requests per second and lasted 109 minutes. Traffic originated from 4120 autonomous systems in 62 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 132.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 109 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.689 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.007% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 780 within 12 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.