On Saturday 18 July 2026 at 19:03 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a video streaming customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 136.9 million requests per second and lasted 143 minutes. Traffic originated from 287 autonomous systems in 7 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 136.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 143 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.395 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.002% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
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 596 within 9 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.