On Wednesday 14 August 2024 at 13:30 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a education platform customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 183.0 million requests per second and lasted 58 minutes. Traffic originated from 3350 autonomous systems in 73 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 183.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 58 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.187 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.54% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 569 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 108 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.