On Monday 16 October 2023 at 18:42 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a ticketing customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 677.1 million requests per second and lasted 26 minutes. Traffic originated from 1485 autonomous systems in 73 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 677.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 26 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.203 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.084% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.02% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 220 within 15 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.