On Tuesday 13 December 2022 at 19:09 UTC, a TLS handshake exhaustion targeted a fashion retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 462.3 million requests per second and lasted 100 minutes. Traffic originated from 563 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | TLS handshake exhaustion |
| Peak | 462.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 100 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.198 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.090% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.77% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 498 within 10 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.