On Friday 18 October 2024 at 22:18 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a retail banking customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 526.5 million requests per second and lasted 166 minutes. Traffic originated from 996 autonomous systems in 93 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 526.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 166 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.320 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 240 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.