On Sunday 13 August 2023 at 09:42 UTC, a login endpoint flood targeted a video streaming customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 852.0 million requests per second and lasted 45 minutes. Traffic originated from 1027 autonomous systems in 66 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | login endpoint flood |
| Peak | 852.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 45 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.504 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 75 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.