On Thursday 17 October 2024 at 19:12 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a crypto exchange customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 496.8 million requests per second and lasted 147 minutes. Traffic originated from 3622 autonomous systems in 71 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 496.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 147 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.805 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.71% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 680 within 39 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 143 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.