On Saturday 5 February 2022 at 19:26 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a news publisher customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 661.5 million requests per second and lasted 123 minutes. Traffic originated from 3849 autonomous systems in 100 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 661.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 123 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.003 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.070% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 231 within 19 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 197 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
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.