On Wednesday 22 February 2023 at 06:15 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a retail banking customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 422.2 million requests per second and lasted 121 minutes. Traffic originated from 167 autonomous systems in 90 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 422.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 121 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.875 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.69% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 369 within 6 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?