On Friday 1 July 2022 at 18:33 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a news publisher customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 454.8 million requests per second and lasted 36 minutes. Traffic originated from 1537 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 454.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 36 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.318 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.25% |
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 524 within 38 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
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.