On Monday 24 April 2023 at 17:47 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a gaming community customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 428.9 million requests per second and lasted 128 minutes. Traffic originated from 988 autonomous systems in 40 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 428.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 128 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.604 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.020% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.19% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 459 within 16 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.