On Thursday 30 June 2022 at 06:06 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a video streaming customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 681.7 million requests per second and lasted 37 minutes. Traffic originated from 914 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 681.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 37 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.784 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.052% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.30% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 606 within 36 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.