On Tuesday 26 October 2021 at 17:34 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a video streaming customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 758.7 million requests per second and lasted 160 minutes. Traffic originated from 4195 autonomous systems in 73 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 758.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 160 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.350 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.012% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.38% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 742 within 18 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?