On Monday 9 September 2024 at 10:56 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 255.1 million requests per second and lasted 84 minutes. Traffic originated from 3074 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 255.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 84 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.228 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 342 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.