On Wednesday 18 March 2026 at 02:56 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a electronics retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 188.9 million requests per second and lasted 78 minutes. Traffic originated from 3032 autonomous systems in 113 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 188.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 78 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.584 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| 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 762 within 18 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 134 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.