On Tuesday 31 December 2024 at 06:20 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online casino customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 720.9 million requests per second and lasted 165 minutes. Traffic originated from 1741 autonomous systems in 33 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 720.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 165 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.846 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.36% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 344 within 33 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.