On Saturday 11 November 2023 at 03:17 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a developer platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 316.6 million requests per second and lasted 68 minutes. Traffic originated from 3903 autonomous systems in 78 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 316.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 68 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.890 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.066% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.30% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 44 within 13 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 46 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.