On Wednesday 8 February 2023 at 02:42 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a ticketing customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 526.3 million requests per second and lasted 167 minutes. Traffic originated from 303 autonomous systems in 56 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 526.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 167 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.476 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.20% |
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 481 within 13 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.