On Thursday 24 July 2025 at 03:11 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a municipal services customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 367.0 million requests per second and lasted 163 minutes. Traffic originated from 1417 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 367.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 163 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.071 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| 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 208 within 32 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?