On Friday 17 October 2025 at 10:11 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a gaming community customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 140.2 million requests per second and lasted 46 minutes. Traffic originated from 1983 autonomous systems in 43 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 140.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 46 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.044 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.067% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.65% |
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 221 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 172 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.