On Saturday 2 December 2023 at 02:43 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 122.3 million requests per second and lasted 94 minutes. Traffic originated from 4122 autonomous systems in 71 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 122.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 94 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.394 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.086% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.30% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 157 within 7 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.