On Wednesday 12 July 2023 at 21:27 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 972.8 million requests per second and lasted 61 minutes. Traffic originated from 3168 autonomous systems in 31 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 972.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 61 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.426 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.037% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.58% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 787 within 37 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.