On Tuesday 6 June 2023 at 04:05 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 105.2 million requests per second and lasted 105 minutes. Traffic originated from 1535 autonomous systems in 57 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 105.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 105 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.897 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.008% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 827 within 35 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.