On Monday 15 January 2024 at 08:12 UTC, a Slowloris targeted a news publisher customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 929.9 million requests per second and lasted 156 minutes. Traffic originated from 4176 autonomous systems in 13 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | Slowloris |
| Peak | 929.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 156 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.375 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.058% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.24% |
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 810 within 12 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
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.