On Monday 22 August 2022 at 00:12 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a fashion retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 895.0 million requests per second and lasted 59 minutes. Traffic originated from 1076 autonomous systems in 82 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 895.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 59 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.685 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.044% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.22% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 275 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 24 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.