On Friday 14 November 2025 at 22:19 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in North America. The attack peaked at 110.4 million requests per second and lasted 38 minutes. Traffic originated from 422 autonomous systems in 43 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 110.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 38 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.271 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.015% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.62% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 745 within 22 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Clear and practical, thanks.