On Friday 9 January 2026 at 20:00 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a developer platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 585.7 million requests per second and lasted 181 minutes. Traffic originated from 3199 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 585.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 181 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.239 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.028% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.26% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 817 within 27 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.