On Tuesday 29 August 2023 at 17:46 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a ticketing customer in North America. The attack peaked at 538.3 million requests per second and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 2008 autonomous systems in 83 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 538.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.693 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.24% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 432 within 32 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.