On Monday 2 October 2023 at 14:06 UTC, a credential stuffing targeted a news publisher customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 522.2 million requests per second and lasted 141 minutes. Traffic originated from 3044 autonomous systems in 111 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | credential stuffing |
| Peak | 522.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 141 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.090 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.74% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 482 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.