On Monday 1 December 2025 at 18:34 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a airline booking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 899.0 million requests per second and lasted 83 minutes. Traffic originated from 736 autonomous systems in 108 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 899.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 83 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.869 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.071% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
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 560 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.