On Friday 9 December 2022 at 14:11 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a ticketing customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 978.0 million requests per second and lasted 155 minutes. Traffic originated from 3039 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 978.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 155 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.056 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.059% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.50% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 293 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
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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.