On Friday 26 January 2024 at 11:10 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 147.9 million requests per second and lasted 76 minutes. Traffic originated from 2547 autonomous systems in 99 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 147.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 76 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.553 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.073% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 331 within 7 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.