On Tuesday 4 October 2022 at 21:26 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a online casino customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 581.3 million requests per second and lasted 139 minutes. Traffic originated from 3053 autonomous systems in 111 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 581.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 139 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.827 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.020% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.61% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 270 within 30 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.