On Tuesday 12 July 2022 at 18:41 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a sports betting customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 510.0 million requests per second and lasted 178 minutes. Traffic originated from 1416 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 510.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 178 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.811 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
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 43 within 35 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.