On Tuesday 13 January 2026 at 20:11 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a online casino customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 445.8 million requests per second and lasted 101 minutes. Traffic originated from 3942 autonomous systems in 63 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 445.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 101 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.673 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.024% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.35% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 816 within 17 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?