On Sunday 19 November 2023 at 09:26 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 138.6 million requests per second and lasted 15 minutes. Traffic originated from 1393 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 138.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 15 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.642 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.010% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.17% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 90 within 17 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 144 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.