On Sunday 3 July 2022 at 12:08 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 79.3 million requests per second and lasted 59 minutes. Traffic originated from 3936 autonomous systems in 34 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 79.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 59 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.453 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
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 767 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
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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.