On Wednesday 13 March 2024 at 23:23 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a online payments customer in North America. The attack peaked at 723.0 million requests per second and lasted 156 minutes. Traffic originated from 1392 autonomous systems in 30 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 723.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 156 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.499 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.79% |
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 801 within 10 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.