On Sunday 19 February 2023 at 07:58 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a municipal services customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 35.0 million requests per second and lasted 173 minutes. Traffic originated from 793 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 35.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 173 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.895 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.053% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
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 404 within 16 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 232 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?