On Friday 25 November 2022 at 17:29 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 267.0 million requests per second and lasted 28 minutes. Traffic originated from 1654 autonomous systems in 69 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 267.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 28 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.690 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.010% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.07% |
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 284 within 11 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.