On Thursday 8 February 2024 at 06:08 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 782.8 million requests per second and lasted 154 minutes. Traffic originated from 2381 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 782.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 154 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.645 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.44% |
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 814 within 20 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.