On Tuesday 5 March 2024 at 04:22 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a municipal services customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 842.1 million requests per second and lasted 53 minutes. Traffic originated from 3018 autonomous systems in 78 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 842.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 53 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.621 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.043% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.58% |
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 564 within 27 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.