On Thursday 19 December 2024 at 18:29 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a sports betting customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 372.5 million requests per second and lasted 16 minutes. Traffic originated from 2053 autonomous systems in 24 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 372.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 16 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.769 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.022% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 688 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?