On Thursday 4 September 2025 at 06:00 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a gaming community customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 896.5 million requests per second and lasted 105 minutes. Traffic originated from 3471 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 896.5 million requests per second |
| Duration | 105 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.505 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.086% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.69% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 748 within 34 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 144 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.