On Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 21:46 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a online payments customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 814.7 million requests per second and lasted 92 minutes. Traffic originated from 471 autonomous systems in 106 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 814.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 92 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.335 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.014% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
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 164 within 28 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 34 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.