On Friday 3 February 2023 at 20:07 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 84.5 million requests per second and lasted 44 minutes. Traffic originated from 1470 autonomous systems in 52 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 84.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 44 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.877 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.062% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.46% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 888 within 11 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.