On Wednesday 20 November 2024 at 20:19 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a sports betting customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 959.4 million requests per second and lasted 46 minutes. Traffic originated from 3871 autonomous systems in 87 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 959.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 46 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.156 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.001% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.52% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 619 within 19 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.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.