On Sunday 14 July 2024 at 04:09 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online casino customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 804.9 million requests per second and lasted 120 minutes. Traffic originated from 1899 autonomous systems in 25 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 804.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 120 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.606 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.013% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 795 within 12 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 196 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.