On Sunday 16 August 2026 at 13:07 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online payments customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 233.5 million requests per second and lasted 184 minutes. Traffic originated from 3207 autonomous systems in 108 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 233.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 184 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.650 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.089% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.34% |
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 662 within 12 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.