On Sunday 4 June 2023 at 13:15 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a online casino customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 861.0 million requests per second and lasted 49 minutes. Traffic originated from 3274 autonomous systems in 95 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 861.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 49 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.837 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.009% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.34% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 504 within 39 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.