On Thursday 19 March 2026 at 10:50 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a retail banking customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 789.4 million requests per second and lasted 90 minutes. Traffic originated from 2830 autonomous systems in 6 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 789.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 90 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.704 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.053% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.01% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 111 within 26 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 111 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.