On Friday 22 December 2023 at 07:19 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a electronics retail customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 525.7 million requests per second and lasted 77 minutes. Traffic originated from 2417 autonomous systems in 51 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 525.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 77 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.701 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.064% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.52% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 740 within 37 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?