On Sunday 29 October 2023 at 09:45 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a online casino customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 609.5 million requests per second and lasted 98 minutes. Traffic originated from 2681 autonomous systems in 98 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 609.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 98 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.661 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.055% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.50% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 394 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.