On Friday 9 February 2024 at 19:59 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a retail banking customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 309.7 million requests per second and lasted 37 minutes. Traffic originated from 1643 autonomous systems in 57 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 309.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 37 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.899 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.000% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 597 within 39 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.