On Monday 2 August 2021 at 04:16 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a gaming community customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 55.8 million requests per second and lasted 140 minutes. Traffic originated from 679 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 55.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 140 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.547 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.087% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 42 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.