On Friday 13 January 2023 at 15:25 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 674.2 million requests per second and lasted 111 minutes. Traffic originated from 2057 autonomous systems in 58 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 674.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 111 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.824 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.019% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.74% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 62 within 19 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.