Threat Bulletin 1431: Slowloris against a video streaming platform in the UK

On Tuesday 18 August 2026 at 00:35 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a video streaming customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 916.1 million requests per second and lasted 182 minutes. Traffic originated from 1450 autonomous systems in 22 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.

Vector Slowloris
Peak 916.1 million requests per second
Duration 182 min
Time to mitigation 0.047 s
Attack traffic reaching origin 0.032%
Legitimate traffic challenged 0.18%

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 80 within 6 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

The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.

Recommendations

  • Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
  • Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
  • Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.

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