On Wednesday 15 June 2022 at 12:30 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 962.0 million requests per second and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 4008 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 962.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.803 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.000% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 84 within 17 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?