On Friday 23 December 2022 at 13:20 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a B2B SaaS customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 740.5 million requests per second and lasted 118 minutes. Traffic originated from 3992 autonomous systems in 116 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 740.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 118 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.736 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.022% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.10% |
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 318 within 11 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.