On Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 13:51 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a airline booking customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 656.8 million requests per second and lasted 30 minutes. Traffic originated from 4082 autonomous systems in 60 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 656.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 30 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.815 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 313 within 5 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.