A China-based lottery website was the target of a HTTP POST flood attack, which peaked at a substantially high rate of 163,000 requests per second. The real surprise came when we realized that the assault was consuming bandwidth at 8.7 gigabits per second (!) This is a record for an application layer attack and definitely the largest we had ever seen or heard about up until that point. The attack campaign was launched from a botnet infected with a Nitol malware variant, accessed the website under the guise of a Baidu spider.”]