On Saturday 10 August 2024 at 06:21 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a video streaming customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 314.2 million requests per second and lasted 155 minutes. Traffic originated from 3755 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 314.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 155 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.346 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.056% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
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 338 within 7 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.