On Friday 10 May 2024 at 08:17 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a video streaming customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 978.0 million requests per second and lasted 39 minutes. Traffic originated from 1716 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 978.0 million requests per second |
| Duration | 39 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.456 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.029% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 203 within 40 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.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.