On Monday 7 August 2023 at 23:05 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 361.6 million requests per second and lasted 136 minutes. Traffic originated from 3710 autonomous systems in 50 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 361.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 136 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.249 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.25% |
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 720 within 23 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.