On Sunday 9 October 2022 at 07:39 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 519.3 million requests per second and lasted 187 minutes. Traffic originated from 1351 autonomous systems in 107 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 519.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 187 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.209 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.015% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
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 492 within 23 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 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.