On Sunday 11 January 2026 at 07:22 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 369.7 million requests per second and lasted 175 minutes. Traffic originated from 2945 autonomous systems in 49 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 369.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 175 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.526 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.090% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 441 within 31 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 190 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.