On Thursday 11 May 2023 at 04:34 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a airline booking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 87.7 million requests per second and lasted 142 minutes. Traffic originated from 4017 autonomous systems in 96 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 87.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 142 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.906 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.063% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.19% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 586 within 18 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.