On Saturday 20 August 2022 at 11:54 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 569.0 million requests per second and lasted 165 minutes. Traffic originated from 497 autonomous systems in 88 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 569.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 165 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.199 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.083% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.40% |
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 541 within 37 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.