On Tuesday 10 March 2026 at 11:03 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online payments customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 821.8 million requests per second and lasted 18 minutes. Traffic originated from 2771 autonomous systems in 93 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 821.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 18 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.467 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.005% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 411 within 14 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.