On Friday 27 October 2023 at 20:00 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online casino customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 408.0 million requests per second and lasted 70 minutes. Traffic originated from 2781 autonomous systems in 36 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 408.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 70 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.497 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.056% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 900 within 28 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 114 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.