On Tuesday 15 July 2025 at 17:39 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a sports betting customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 127.2 million requests per second and lasted 6 minutes. Traffic originated from 1417 autonomous systems in 7 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 127.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 6 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.034 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.019% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
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 460 within 20 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.