On Wednesday 1 March 2023 at 14:14 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a airline booking customer in North America. The attack peaked at 565.6 million requests per second and lasted 50 minutes. Traffic originated from 1293 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 565.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 50 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.829 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.030% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.32% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 730 within 17 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 219 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.