On Thursday 30 January 2025 at 18:22 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a municipal services customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 88.1 million requests per second and lasted 164 minutes. Traffic originated from 2781 autonomous systems in 89 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 88.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 164 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.560 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.030% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 762 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.