On Monday 19 December 2022 at 05:51 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 741.7 million requests per second and lasted 128 minutes. Traffic originated from 1470 autonomous systems in 21 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 741.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 128 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.222 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.055% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.02% |
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 593 within 6 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 173 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.