On Wednesday 13 July 2022 at 20:41 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a news publisher customer in North America. The attack peaked at 572.6 million requests per second and lasted 66 minutes. Traffic originated from 4027 autonomous systems in 33 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 572.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 66 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.258 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.39% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 622 within 8 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.