On Tuesday 20 May 2025 at 03:11 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a municipal services customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 550.6 million requests per second and lasted 6 minutes. Traffic originated from 128 autonomous systems in 114 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 550.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 6 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.391 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.073% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 335 within 26 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 193 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?