On Sunday 28 July 2024 at 17:46 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 507.8 million requests per second and lasted 161 minutes. Traffic originated from 579 autonomous systems in 11 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 507.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 161 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.584 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.043% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 561 within 23 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.