On Thursday 30 October 2025 at 23:41 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a sports betting customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 310.2 million requests per second and lasted 14 minutes. Traffic originated from 2104 autonomous systems in 36 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 310.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 14 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.309 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.058% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.70% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 533 within 38 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.