On Friday 1 August 2025 at 04:37 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a news publisher customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 684.8 million requests per second and lasted 130 minutes. Traffic originated from 2280 autonomous systems in 41 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 684.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 130 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.289 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.082% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.74% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 431 within 10 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.