On Wednesday 6 August 2025 at 07:16 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 717.6 million requests per second and lasted 45 minutes. Traffic originated from 1704 autonomous systems in 65 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 717.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 45 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.537 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.043% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.73% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 623 within 10 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.