On Saturday 3 June 2023 at 03:07 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a news publisher customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 830.4 million requests per second and lasted 43 minutes. Traffic originated from 3171 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 830.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 43 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.429 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.085% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.16% |
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 261 within 19 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 34 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.