On Thursday 17 August 2023 at 20:51 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a gaming community customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 978.4 million requests per second and lasted 47 minutes. Traffic originated from 509 autonomous systems in 11 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 978.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 47 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.198 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.031% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.48% |
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 718 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.