On Thursday 1 April 2021 at 14:20 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a gaming community customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 695.3 million requests per second and lasted 14 minutes. Traffic originated from 3012 autonomous systems in 29 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 695.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 14 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.628 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.089% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
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 594 within 34 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.