On Thursday 19 February 2026 at 06:18 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a news publisher customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 721.6 million requests per second and lasted 81 minutes. Traffic originated from 3190 autonomous systems in 17 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 721.6 million requests per second |
| Duration | 81 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.709 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.012% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.02% |
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 879 within 5 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 232 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.