On Wednesday 4 December 2024 at 03:35 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a education platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 660.0 million requests per second and lasted 5 minutes. Traffic originated from 71 autonomous systems in 24 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 660.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 5 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.626 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.045% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.35% |
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 566 within 25 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.