On Thursday 29 February 2024 at 05:03 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a online payments customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 169.5 million requests per second and lasted 42 minutes. Traffic originated from 2670 autonomous systems in 70 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 169.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 42 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.821 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.069% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.47% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 434 within 6 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?