On Thursday 24 November 2022 at 12:26 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 86.6 million requests per second and lasted 36 minutes. Traffic originated from 2742 autonomous systems in 62 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 86.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 36 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.822 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.056% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
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 475 within 28 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.