On Wednesday 11 May 2022 at 13:58 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a gaming community customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 766.4 million requests per second and lasted 28 minutes. Traffic originated from 2119 autonomous systems in 40 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 766.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 28 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.844 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.58% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 107 within 16 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.