On Thursday 6 August 2026 at 01:34 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 863.4 million requests per second and lasted 49 minutes. Traffic originated from 1881 autonomous systems in 97 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 863.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 49 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.303 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.056% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 317 within 7 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 81 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?