On Thursday 9 March 2023 at 20:25 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a news publisher customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 573.2 million requests per second and lasted 132 minutes. Traffic originated from 503 autonomous systems in 30 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 573.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 132 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.527 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.016% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
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 360 within 13 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?