On Saturday 30 December 2023 at 12:17 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 99.8 million requests per second and lasted 34 minutes. Traffic originated from 66 autonomous systems in 22 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 99.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 34 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.087 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.43% |
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 507 within 40 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.