On Friday 2 February 2024 at 06:21 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a municipal services customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 545.1 million requests per second and lasted 158 minutes. Traffic originated from 2983 autonomous systems in 110 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 545.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 158 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.142 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.008% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.48% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 451 within 18 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
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.