On Thursday 12 December 2024 at 18:29 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a crypto exchange customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 301.0 million requests per second and lasted 166 minutes. Traffic originated from 439 autonomous systems in 115 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 301.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 166 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.467 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.005% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
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 890 within 8 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.