On Tuesday 19 May 2026 at 16:44 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a ticketing customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 784.1 million requests per second and lasted 127 minutes. Traffic originated from 2405 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 784.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 127 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.642 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.049% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.66% |
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 227 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.