On Monday 10 July 2023 at 07:04 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a sports betting customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 638.8 million requests per second and lasted 140 minutes. Traffic originated from 233 autonomous systems in 78 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 638.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 140 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.934 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.010% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.21% |
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 681 within 35 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 119 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.