On Wednesday 12 January 2022 at 18:09 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 832.5 million requests per second and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 2101 autonomous systems in 87 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 832.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.428 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.083% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 382 within 36 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Clear and practical, thanks.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.