On Monday 21 February 2022 at 04:30 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 798.1 million requests per second and lasted 136 minutes. Traffic originated from 3066 autonomous systems in 44 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 798.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 136 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.006 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.037% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.53% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 135 within 11 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.