On Thursday 10 February 2022 at 01:44 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a education platform customer in North America. The attack peaked at 911.8 million requests per second and lasted 57 minutes. Traffic originated from 1527 autonomous systems in 101 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 911.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 57 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.811 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.026% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.05% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 876 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.