On Thursday 15 December 2022 at 05:23 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 979.8 million requests per second and lasted 159 minutes. Traffic originated from 4048 autonomous systems in 91 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 979.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 159 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.460 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.090% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.64% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 442 within 12 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 86 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.