The challenge
The client's platform had no dedicated layer between the public internet and their application infrastructure. Automated login attempts using credential lists were a near-constant background load, occasionally spiking hard enough to degrade performance for legitimate users. A separate traffic surge during a product launch had come close to taking the platform down entirely.
What we did
We deployed bot management in front of the platform to separate automated credential-stuffing traffic from real user sessions without adding login friction, paired with a DDoS scrubbing layer sized for the client's realistic worst-case traffic. Both sat in front of a managed PaaS environment with headroom to scale during future launches.
- Fingerprinted and blocked automated login traffic without adding CAPTCHAs for real users
- Deployed DDoS scrubbing sized against modeled peak-launch traffic, not average load
- Migrated the application layer onto managed PaaS with headroom to scale on demand
- Set up alerting tuned to distinguish real attack patterns from normal traffic spikes
We stopped finding out about attacks from our own users. Now the alert fires before anyone outside the team notices anything.
The result
Since deployment, the client has had zero successful credential-stuffing attempts get through. During their next major product launch — the same category of event that had nearly caused an outage before — the platform maintained 99.97% uptime through the traffic peak.