On Saturday 21 September 2024 at 12:52 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a retail banking customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 58.9 million requests per second and lasted 124 minutes. Traffic originated from 1370 autonomous systems in 54 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 58.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 124 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.318 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.070% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.55% |
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 51 within 29 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
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.