On Thursday 22 June 2023 at 19:38 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 306.8 million requests per second and lasted 131 minutes. Traffic originated from 1549 autonomous systems in 35 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 306.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 131 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.707 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
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 466 within 18 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.