On Sunday 15 October 2023 at 09:16 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a education platform customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 144.2 million requests per second and lasted 128 minutes. Traffic originated from 3669 autonomous systems in 41 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 144.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 128 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.212 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.047% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
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 408 within 31 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.