On Thursday 6 March 2025 at 06:58 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 542.0 million requests per second and lasted 12 minutes. Traffic originated from 1977 autonomous systems in 24 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 542.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 12 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.588 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.058% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 581 within 21 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 25 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.