On Wednesday 12 April 2023 at 07:20 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 783.2 million requests per second and lasted 23 minutes. Traffic originated from 3041 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 783.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 23 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.108 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.073% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.78% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 428 within 27 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.