Mawrooth · RB-MWTURNSTILE

Turnstile Bot Protection — incident runbook

Runbook hubMawrooth console

Turnstile Bot Protection is monitored by Challenge verification monitor on challenge verification failure rate. It is owned by Security Engineering and serves the business services listed below. Use this runbook when an alert fires on this component.

Warning at challenge verification failure rate ≥ 3%, critical at ≥ 8%. Critical means user-visible impact: page the escalation owner.

dashboard: sim://grafana/mw-turnstilelogs: sim://logs/mw-turnstileowner: Security Engineeringrunbook: RB-MWTURNSTILE

Signals & thresholds

  • Primary metric: challenge verification failure rate (%)
  • Warning threshold: ≥ 3%
  • Critical threshold: ≥ 8%
  • Dashboard: sim://grafana/mw-turnstile
  • Log source: sim://logs/mw-turnstile
  • SLA: 99.5% monthly availability
  • SLO: 99.9% of requests under warning threshold
  • External dependencies: Cloudflare Turnstile

1. Detection

  1. Challenge verification monitor reports challenge verification failure rate above the warning threshold — users cannot complete sign-in or verification.
  2. Support receives multiple access-denied reports within minutes.

2. Triage

  1. Confirm status of Cloudflare Turnstile.
  2. Separate new sign-ins from token refresh failures.
  3. Check whether failures are global or limited to one tenant or provider.

3. Mitigation

  1. Post an operator notice with the expected recovery window.
  2. Avoid forced re-authentication while the provider is degraded.
  3. Pause bulk invitations and verification batches.

4. Verification

  1. Confirm challenge verification failure rate has been below the warning threshold for at least 10 minutes.
  2. Confirm the affected business services are healthy on the dashboard.
  3. Confirm no alerts remain open for this component and its downstream consumers.
  4. Spot-check one real end-to-end operation through the affected flow.

5. Rollback / restore

  1. If a deploy caused the incident, roll back to the previous release and re-verify.
  2. If a configuration or threshold change caused it, restore the previous value and record why.
  3. Re-enable any job, feature flag or channel that was paused during mitigation, one at a time.

Escalation path

  • First responder: NOC on duty — acknowledge within 5 minutes.
  • Component owner: Security Engineering.
  • Escalation owner (page on critical): Security Engineering.
  • Escalate if the metric is still critical 15 minutes after mitigation, or if data integrity is in doubt.
  • Declare a major incident if two or more critical components are alerting at the same time.

Blast radius — business services affected (1)

Sign In & Verification

External dependencies

Cloudflare Turnstile — Bot challenge verification on sign-up and sign-in

Simulated incidents that exercise this runbook

Authentication outage — Session issuance and verification codes failing; members cannot sign in.

Security event surge — Sign-in abuse and blocked-URL events spiking; throttles engaging.

Reporting notes

  • Record start time, actions taken and recovery time in the incident record.
  • Attach the dashboard screenshot and the dominant error message to the postmortem.
  • Content drafted for the monitoring demo — confirm the exact commands with the owning team before production use.