On Monday 31 July 2023 at 06:08 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 715.9 million requests per second and lasted 116 minutes. Traffic originated from 3530 autonomous systems in 46 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 715.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 116 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.829 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.065% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 106 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.