Threat Bulletin 1230: HTTP GET flood against a sports betting platform in Central Europe

On Sunday 9 November 2025 at 06:34 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a sports betting customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 246.5 million requests per second and lasted 151 minutes. Traffic originated from 1305 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.

Vector HTTP GET flood
Peak 246.5 million requests per second
Duration 151 min
Time to mitigation 0.902 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.028%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.13%

Timeline

The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 556 within 16 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.
  • Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
  • Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.

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