On Monday 4 July 2022 at 15:51 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a online casino customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 331.4 million requests per second and lasted 17 minutes. Traffic originated from 2619 autonomous systems in 87 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 331.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 17 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.900 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| 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 598 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.