On Saturday 22 July 2023 at 18:37 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a ticketing customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 178.9 million requests per second and lasted 37 minutes. Traffic originated from 3220 autonomous systems in 96 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 178.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 37 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.266 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.065% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.02% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 649 within 8 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 171 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.