On Friday 19 August 2022 at 08:43 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 980.0 million requests per second and lasted 31 minutes. Traffic originated from 1954 autonomous systems in 69 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 980.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 31 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.190 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.061% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 420 within 12 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.