On Saturday 16 November 2024 at 19:54 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a airline booking customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 386.6 million requests per second and lasted 111 minutes. Traffic originated from 1722 autonomous systems in 10 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 386.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 111 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.937 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.062% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
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 249 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.