On Saturday 12 July 2025 at 20:59 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 837.4 million requests per second and lasted 176 minutes. Traffic originated from 3224 autonomous systems in 96 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 837.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 176 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.177 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.018% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.60% |
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 431 within 12 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.