Threat Bulletin 1077: HTTP/2 rapid reset against a ticketing platform in Western Europe

On Sunday 13 April 2025 at 01:14 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a ticketing customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 265.3 million requests per second and lasted 104 minutes. Traffic originated from 4189 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.

Vector HTTP/2 rapid reset
Peak 265.3 million requests per second
Duration 104 min
Time to mitigation 0.923 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.053%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.59%

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 788 within 24 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

  • Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
  • Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
  • Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.

5 thoughts on “Threat Bulletin 1077: HTTP/2 rapid reset against a ticketing platform in Western Europe”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top