On Tuesday 8 November 2022 at 21:35 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a tax authority portal customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 644.0 million requests per second and lasted 189 minutes. Traffic originated from 2794 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 644.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 189 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.151 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.049% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 537 within 37 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Clear and practical, thanks.