On Thursday 28 July 2022 at 22:31 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a video streaming customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 812.0 million requests per second and lasted 31 minutes. Traffic originated from 1406 autonomous systems in 95 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 812.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 31 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.636 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.067% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.18% |
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 431 within 27 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.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.