On Sunday 20 July 2025 at 02:28 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a fashion retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 196.9 million requests per second and lasted 40 minutes. Traffic originated from 2896 autonomous systems in 49 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 196.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 40 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.225 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.063% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.77% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 564 within 7 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.