On Friday 1 April 2022 at 13:08 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a crypto exchange customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 369.1 million requests per second and lasted 182 minutes. Traffic originated from 3983 autonomous systems in 56 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 369.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 182 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.675 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.033% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 513 within 20 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.