On Monday 24 January 2022 at 12:32 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 351.5 million requests per second and lasted 118 minutes. Traffic originated from 3790 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 351.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 118 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.501 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.089% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 821 within 37 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 191 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.