On Monday 13 February 2023 at 17:41 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 216.6 million requests per second and lasted 57 minutes. Traffic originated from 937 autonomous systems in 101 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 216.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 57 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.605 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.034% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.74% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 430 within 39 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.