On Tuesday 8 September 2026 at 16:22 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a video streaming customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 816.3 million requests per second and lasted 94 minutes. Traffic originated from 2651 autonomous systems in 51 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 816.3 million requests per second |
| Duration | 94 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.302 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.022% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.25% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 165 within 22 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.