On Sunday 13 October 2024 at 18:55 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 584.3 million requests per second and lasted 165 minutes. Traffic originated from 453 autonomous systems in 11 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 584.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 165 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.485 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.046% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 123 within 20 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.