On Wednesday 26 August 2026 at 09:47 UTC, a WebSocket connection flood targeted a electronics retail customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 145.4 million requests per second and lasted 70 minutes. Traffic originated from 1079 autonomous systems in 24 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | WebSocket connection flood |
| Peak | 145.4 million requests per second |
| Duration | 70 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.715 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.016% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.59% |
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 825 within 6 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 227 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.